Content
The book focuses mainly on the biographical details of Kafka's life, interspersed with short illustrated vignettes from his writing. The author relates Kafka's personality and various incidents in his life to the content of his stories. For example, the fact that he saw himself as a burden on his family is compared to stories in which the protagonist is an animal - most notably The Metamorphosis, in which the protagonist Gregor Samsa awakes to find himself transformed into a giant bug, becoming a burden to his family and becoming no longer able to support them.
Whether or not these parallels can be drawn so easily is a question reagarding Psychoanalytic literary criticism and Authorial intent.
Read more about this topic: Introducing Kafka
Famous quotes containing the word content:
“You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.”
—Samuel Beckett (19061989)
“... the aspiring immigrant ... is not content to progress alone. Solitary success is imperfect success in his eyes. He must take his family with him as he rises.”
—Mary Antin (18811949)
“The content of a thought depends on its external relations; on the way that the thought is related to the world, not on the way that it is related to other thoughts.”
—Jerry Alan Fodor (b. 1935)