Literature 101

Franz Kafka’s metamorphosis falls squarely in the genre of modernist fiction. Kafka wrote it in 1912 and published in 1915. The fate of a lonely travelling salesman Gregor expresses the common modernist concern with the alienating effects of modern society. Kafka’s emphasis on the disintegration of family bonds, and the alienating experience of modern life reverberated strongly with a reading public that had just survived World War I and was on its way to a second world war. Today Kafka’s reputation as one of the most important writers of modern times is undiminished . Kafka employs the fictional literary elements he constructs to address the very non- fictional, existentialist aspects of society and life. Gregor Samsa is the protagonist of the metamorphosis. By starting out with Gregor's metamorphosis into a bug , The Metamorphosis  plays around with some interesting questions as to the significance of transformation. Samsa transforms through reverse evolution. Reverse e...

Ophelia in The Waste  Land    Eliot uses many allusions to bring about the main point of the poem. We find Ophelia through the chorus of a woman leaving the bar.   This chorus- “good night ladies, good night sweet ladies, good night   good night.”   Eliot refers us to Ophelia’s madness with this line; it is an exact echo of her line in Hamlet. Ophelia in hamlet is a obedient daughter of Polonius and hamlets love interest. She caught between her obedience to her father and her love for hamlet which has tragic consequences. She is separated from normal life because of her madness that is triggered by her father’s death and the banishment of hamlet.She suffered a mysterious death, she accidently falls in the water and then simply neglects to save herself from drowning. Her drowning links her to the image of death by water that recurs throughout the wasteland. Ophelia’s death by water is believed by many to be a suicide. Suicide suggests...

                                 Morality play is a dramatized allegory , and the time span of a morality play is one human life. The usual subject of it, is about saving the human soul. The central figure is man in the sense of humanity in general. Morality play contains the forces of good and evil that are engaged in a struggle for the soul of an individual. It spoke  to medieval mans anxiety about being prepared for death or dying well. Many of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have ,through accidentally, a moral significance. This plays appear to preach a moral lesson , evil suffers and good triumphs . The story in MACBETH runs through the narration of evil deeds of the inevitable retribution that follows those evil deeds. But many critics say that Shakespeare diverges from the morality tradition in Macbeth .He is not giving any moral lesson in here but  emphasis sympathetically the h...