The Name Of The Game

The term « Kafkaesque » is used to describe something that is reminiscent of Kafka’s work. Now, when you write you can never fully separate your experiences from your words and so all of Kafka’s works had something to do with his real life. To describe the Kafkaesque style, the film “Kafka” provides some striking examples. The film uses techniques such as Kafka’s relationship with his father to convey elements of Kafka’s life. It also includes the fact that Kafka dies at a young age from tuberculosis. This is clear the moment we see the main character coughing blood. In the end he also writes a letter to his father, admitting that ignorance is bliss. This implies that they used to have a very rough relationship, and that now that he’s given up hope in the truth, he reaches out to his father again. The movie provided some references to The Metamorphosis, such as the fact that everyone is scared of a man with animalistic features and is seen as a monster. It is also mentioned that the character worked at his place for eight years, while Gregor worked hard at the same working place as well. As mentioned before, the relationship to his father is an important reference not only to Kafka’s life, but to Gregor’s life as well. The scheme of something extraordinary happening, with the conclusion that everything goes back to normal in the end is almost like a moral, seen in the film as well as in The Metamorphosis. The film blurs the lines between the real and the surreal because the observer is never sure when something is happening in ‘reality’ and when something’s fantasy. To make it clear which is which, the use of color plays an enormous part in the differentiation between real and surreal. When Kafka goes into the castle where he encounters all these scientific anomalies, the film is in color, while when he goes back to work and identifies his friend’s dead body, we see him in black and white again. The absurd in met when the scientists in the film are modern, but Kaka’s modern work that is borderline extravagant, is made fun of. The scientists also want to transform everyone into the same robots, respecting them not more or less than a simple bug, but when Kafka comes up with a story outlining this phenomena, society sees him as too demanding and outraging. The political revolutionaries want to find out the truth, but are taken and transformed into animalistic creatures. Class is also an issue discussed in the movie, because the upper class are the people in the castle that are harming the poor and innocent. At one moment, we see the richer men in society stuffing themselves full of food like barbaric animals, just before they get blown into the air. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s first thoughts after he notices his transformation are absurd: He can’t go to work. It seems like he’s a robot in society and only breaks out of it when he becomes a bug. Irony is met when you think about the picture he was trying to protect from being taken by his family, showing a woman in fur, representing his always know life goals: being rich. Kafkaesque refers to all of the above. Kafka created his own unique style of writing, and nowadays people can identify a piece of writing as being ‘Kafkaesque’, and as confusing as people might think his writings are, there is much more to it than a simple transformation into a bug, and as discussed in previous blogs, something funny.