We talked in class about the "dreamlike" nature of Kafka's prose. The similarity, as we discussed, comes from the fact that in The Metamorphoses, at least, everything seems realistic except for one bizarre change, which everyone accepts unquestioningly. This occurs in dreams as well. Now, the transposition of dreams into waking life is what interests me, because Gregor "awakes FROM troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a giant cockroach." It's made very clear that this is no dream, and yet, the connection between this... incident and the troubled dreams that he had been having during its occurrence is unmistakable. Was he dreaming about becoming a cockroach and being late to work because of it? Sounds like a dream I'd have. So is The Metamorphoses simply a tale about waking up to find that your dream has crossed into the waking world? I think so. Really, the only thing separating this from being a dream, at this point, is the fact that it's stated (not by Gregor, but by the omniscient narrator) that it is not a dream. What makes it not-a-dream? It's an unheimlich doppelganger of reality in which the fantastic is accepted as the ordinary; the only difference is that it's not occurring in someone's head. Of necessity, then, Gregor should be able to interact with the other humans. But the involvement of others, and their cooperation with dream-logic, means that either they're either figments of his imagination (i.e. dream creations) or else possibly fellow not-dreamers or some such. We're told very clearly that this is not a dream, so even when daddy issues come up in a big way (another sign that one is dreaming) we have to assume that the minds of his compatriots have been changed somehow from normal alert human thought processes to reflect a state of mind identical to that of projections of others that we see in dreams.
Food for thought, I guess.
1 comment:
Well said. And it is these "dreamlike" qualities of the waking-life fictional world Kafka creates that leads so many critics to want to interpret every aspect of the story symbolically, or in terms of Freudian paradigms, or whatever. Just as in dreams, the bizarre seems to cry out for interpretation--it *must* "mean something," and in this case, it seems like a radical externalization of all kinds of repressed psychological issues for Gregor. (Pretty much every scene with the father--or, as a Freudian would put it, The Father--fits the bill here.)
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