Introducing Kafka - Content

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:

    Our frigate takes fire,
    The other asks if we demand quarter?
    If our colors are struck and the fighting done?
    Now I laugh content for I hear the voice of my little captain,
    We have not struck, he composedly cries, we have just begun our part of the fighting.
    Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    They tell us that women can bring better things to pass by indirect influence. Try to persuade any man that he will have more weight, more influence, if he gives up his vote, allies himself with no party and relies on influence to achieve his ends! By all means let us use to the utmost whatever influence we have, but in all justice do not ask us to be content with this.
    Mrs. William C. Gannett, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 5, ch. 8, by Ida Husted Harper (1922)

    Quintilian [educational writer in Rome about A.D. 100] hoped that teachers would be sensitive to individual differences of temperament and ability. . . . Beating, he thought, was usually unnecessary. A teacher who had made the effort to understand his pupil’s individual needs and character could probably dispense with it: “I will content myself with saying that children are helpless and easily victimized, and that therefore no one should be given unlimited power over them.”
    C. John Sommerville (20th century)