Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Vision of the Body

Through the metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa, Kafka not only traces modern earths sense of alienation from his torso, but as well as anticipates Postmodernist imagings on individualismthe way that identity relates to the body, and the social constructs of marginality and normality, that infallibly reminds us the industrial plant of Michel Foucault, who examined the disciplining and medicalization of body as a form of social control. Gregor Samsas sudden baring of his transformed body is another form of the horrible confusion that Samuel Beckett afterward explores in his plays. There are no such pretty, healthy bodies in Beckett.His characters are infirm, decrepit figures that are, as Beckett described them, falling to bits. Some theorists of the proboscis trace the emphasis on normal body to industrial capitalism, which essential a standardized body for factory work and labeled the antithetical body as abnormal. This social conditioning can also be associated with the recent dreads like anorexia and bulimia in especially teenaged girls, who in the desire to wear size zero dress, that is extremely ordinary in America and to look wonderfully thin endanger their lives with starvation.This is an simulation of how the market forces of capitalistic power play manipulate the concept of identity by constructing a norm of the body. In spite of the traces of the modernist horror of disordered identity, there is also an element of Postmodernist fantastic in Kafkas tale where the transformation of the body is more marvelous than terrible. The 2001 film Amelie had a protagonist who literally melts when her love interest leaves the restaurant in which she works without asking her for a dateunmistakably reminding the viewer Kafkas vision of the Body as marvelous.