Heavy Metal E-Book

Anand Bose

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The author draws upon a wide reading of texts on literature, philosophy and religion. The author follows the methodology of inter-textuality. This is a discourse on literary theory, literature and philosophy. The writings permeate wth the  weltanschauung of the author's take on philosophy.

Leseprobe

Anand Bose

Heavy Metal

Dedicated to my Loving Father Prof. V A Mathen Bose BookRix GmbH & Co. KG80331 Munich

Analysis of Literary Themes in Kafka's Metamorphosis

Kafka is a prolific writer and is regarded as an early writer of existentialism and its ensuing character of angst.

Let me brief you with the story and how it goes. One, early morning, when the salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up, to his surprise he finds himself to be transformed into a gigantic insect. And it’s early morning, and he has to go to work. When he is not time, an officer comes to find out what happened. The parents and sister are worried as he is the sole provider of the household.

The major themes through which Kafka’s literary oeuvre can analyzed are lethargy, nausea, anxiety.

The first that creeps up is lethargy or boredom. Kafka becomes fed up with the daily routine of life. The familiar surroundings of his house, room are all appearing to be an irritating symptom of the mind. Yes, Kafka is a visionary that mankind has failed to understand. Kafka is at a loss to speak as his voice transforms into an insect squeak. There is no room for Kafka to explore the realms of an aesthetic consciousness. The morbidity of life is an affected ailment. We have to ask whether Kafka is fed up with the identity of his own body. He is living in a Waste Land as proposed in Eliot’s poem. In the metamorphosis, life is meaningless and harsh and caricatures the sensitivity of an affected soul. Life is a tempted poison drowning itself into a  sea that itself is polluted. The charisma to live life to the fullest is shadowed into a dark eclipse, into a stream where there is no hope. Kafka was sinking into a political and cultural dystopia and could not emerge from his self-created literary black hole.

The second theme of Metamorphosis is nausea or angst. The famous philosopher Schopenhauer said: ‘the will to live or the will to die’. The will of the writer is drowning in the personification of consciousness. It’s through the transformation of the body into an insect that Kafka epitomizes the negativity of the soul. Is the writer’s body an unrequited fountain of love?  Throughout the career of the writer, Kafka had troubled feelings with the father. Is he a being with narcissistic delusions of an oedipal conflict? Is the angst a plague to disguise the hidden existential trauma in the mind of the writer? The Metamorphosis as a grandeur oeuvre is caught up in the narratives of guilt and shame. The being is a fictional self, warped, caught up in the anthropic dilemma which poses questions that cannot be proved or answered.

To conclude: Kafka is a metaphoric self of our being, our travails, or defeats, our isolations which make us humanely imperfect.  

Analysis of Being

Being or philosophically called Ontology is something that has perplexed Philosophers. There is a whole range of thinkers starting from Heidegger and extending up to Camus and Sartre who have expounded on the Philosophy of Being. But all these explanations have not been satisfactory.

What is Being? Being is a part of the Ontology of being in a process. Being is a part of processual ontology.

Being can be influenced by culture and historicity of lived consciousness. Being has also got temporality. Culture, historicity and temporality influencing being are external factors and they go a long way in shaping individuality.

Being for the Philosopher Camus meant the absurd. Camus outlined the Philosophy of being through the myth of the Sisyphus. In the myth of the Sisyphus, a man is condemned to roll a boulder uphill, and only to his consternation it has rolled down. The man is Sisyphus is forced to do a repetitive and meaningless task. For Camus life is absurd and man is forced to do repetitive and meaningless tasks.

For me, I would like to elaborate on being as a celebration of life. Being is always in the process of creating lived meaning. Being is the preciousness of lived meaning. Being is the preciousness of lived life.

The Philosopher Sartre has created a three-fold meaning of being and they are: being-in-itself, being for-it-self and being for others. Being-in-itself is a primary state of consciousness. Being for itself is a lived consciousness of life and being for others is a being that tries to live for others. For Sartre: life is meaningless and man is condemned to be free.

For me life is a preciousness and being is a creative process of creating meaning. Being is the preciousness of life. Being has to exert meaning by making creative choices.

Now I would like to elaborate on being and its interiority.

The exteriority of being is found in Historicity, Culture and Temporality. The exteriority of being shapes some aspects of individuality.

On the other hand, the interiority of being is the consciousness of ego formation. It lies in two states of being and they are: cathartic affirmation and angstual negation.

What is Cathartic affirmation? Cathartic affirmation is the pleasure of experiencing lived meaning. Certain states of emotion like love, peace, joy, orgasm and altered states, all of these forms a part of being called Cathartic affirmation.

Now, what is angstual (adjective of angst) negation? Angstual negation is found in emotional states like hate, anger, malice, covetousness, and so on.

To conclude I would like to say: Being is not absurd or meaningless as the existentialist philosophers say. Being is also not repetitive or monotonous. Being is a precious gift of meaning. Being is a choice of creating meaningful meaning. There are two states of being and they are the external states and the internal states. The external states lie in historicity, temporality, and culture. The internal state of being lies in cathartic affirmation and angstual negation.

Evolution of The Metaphor

The Metaphor, a comparison between two things has evolved through stages. There are two aspects of the metaphor, one being the tenor and the other the vehicle. He is a thin stick is a metaphor. In it, he is a is a tenor and thin stick is the vehicle.

The Metaphor has come a long way in its evolution to the present. Here, in this essay, I would like to describe the functions of the metaphor and the categories to which they belong. Metaphors can be classified into Spiritual or transcendental metaphors, literary or aesthetic metaphors, political metaphors, psychological metaphors and cultural metaphors.

Spiritual or transcendental metaphors focus on the divine as a celebrity of thought. I would like to invoke an Egyptian scribe who said: my writing resembles the sun God. Jesus said: I am the way: the truth and the life. Father give us this day out daily bread. The seed of life is the fruit of God. God is the wind of a transcendental spirit. God echoes mercy from the heart. Heaven is God’s throne and the earth God’s footstool. God’s love is never-ending, like a deep ocean. In the beginning was the Word: the word was with God: the word was God. I am the Alpha and the Omega: the beginning and the end. These are examples of a spiritual metaphor and they focus on the transcendental spirit that is God.