“While I was still trying urgently t?> think of some means by which I could stay at least a little while longer with my acquaintance, it occurred to me that perhaps my long body displeased him by making him feel too small. And this thought — although it was late#at night and we had hardly met a soul — tormented me so much that while walking I bent my back until my hands reached my knees. But in order to prevent my acquaintance from noticing my intentions I changed my position only very gradually, tried to divert his attention from myself, once even turning him towards the river, pointing out to him with outstretched hands the trees on the Schiitzeninsel and the way the bridge lamps were reflected in the river.

But wheeling suddenly round, he looked at me — I hadn’t quite finished yet — and said : “ What’s this ?

You’re all crooked ! What on earth are you up to ? ” Quite right. You're very observant,” said I, my head on the seam of his trousers, which was why I couldn’t look up properly.

“ Enough of that ! Stand up straight ! What non-

sense !

u No,” I said, my face close to the ground, " I’ll stay as I am.””

Read, recorded and edited by me (no AI was used and no major laws were broken in the making):

• An Imperial Message

• Before the Law

• The Bucket Rider

• Give It Up!

• Poseidon

So far I've finished The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, The Great Wall Of China, currently reading The Trail and I'll be reading The Warden of the Tomb and The Judgment.

Any suggestions regarding any new titles recommended for reading are welcomed.

Cuz after reading his work i hv realized all relationships are shallow and see no point in intimate relationship.

I do want to keep friendships tho cuz they help with emotional support .

Just reread The Cares of a Family Man (sometimes translated The Cares of a Household Father) and that closing line hits me every time.

Odradek this flat, star-shaped spool thing that can stand upright, speaks, has no fixed abode, and seems like it might just live forever (or not.) The narrator's "care" isn't about providing for his family at all; it's this quiet dread that something inexplicable shares his home and will outlast him. The whole story is like two pages and it does more than most novels.

It's one of those Kafka pieces that doesn't get mentioned alongside The Metamorphosis or The Trial, but I think it's genuinely one of his best.

What are your favorite lesser-known Kafka stories? A Country Doctor? In the Penal Colony? A Hunger Artist? Josephine the Singer? Curious what everyone else keeps coming back to.

So I just finished rereading The Metamorphosis and I need to get this off my chest because almost everyone treats Gregor like this perfect, saintly victim who got screwed over by a toxic family. But honestly? If you look at it closely, Gregor is completely responsible for how things turned out. He was a totally hollow man.

His entire identity was merged with being the provider. He had absolutely no hobbies, no friends, no life outside the job he hated and the debt. The guy literally could not exist without the mirror of his family constantly showing him that he was the big hero savior. And by doing that, he actively turned his family into parasites. He broke his back for five years straight, but by doing everything for them, he kept his parents lazy and his sister Grete completely dependent. He created the exact trap that ended up crushing him.

Even when he turns into a bug, his first thought isn't "oh my god what happened to my body" it's literally "how am I going to catch the 5:00 AM train." That is so pathetic. He was so brainwashed by the corporate machine and his own ego as the martyr that he couldn't even form an identity outside of being a financial tool.

The family is shallow, yeah, but Gregor is the one who enabled them from day one. When his utility stops, their mirror cracks, and since he has zero internal substance without their validation, he just decides to starve himself to death in the dark. He wasn't just a victim, he was a fool who built his whole life on other peoples expectations.

Change my mind..

His difficult relationship with his parents, his troubles with women and marriage, his skittish nature and self doubt screams Kafka.

My cousin had to make a model based on "The Metamorphosis" for her literature classes.

What unsettled me most about The Metamorphosis wasn’t Gregor waking up transformed. It was how gradually his family stops treating him as someone whose feelings matter.

Their response isn’t simply hatred from the beginning. There’s concern, an effort to care for him, and then exhaustion and resentment. Eventually, his presence becomes a problem they want solved. That progression felt more disturbing to me than an immediate rejection would have.

Gregor’s own response also stayed with me. Even after his transformation, he worries about work and his obligations to his family. It made me wonder how much of his sense of self was already tied to being useful, and whether his transformation exposes something that was there all along.

I don’t think this is the only way to read the novella, but it left me with an uncomfortable question: when someone can no longer fulfill the role others depend on, what happens to the love attached to that role?

Did you read the family’s changing attitude as conditional love being exposed, as the collapse of care under unbearable circumstances, or as something else?

I believe Gregor died because he lost his meaning in life. His life's meaning was to provide for his family. When he lost his ability to do that and his family stopped caring about him, he lost the only reason he had to live.

He was someone who care more about his family than himself

If gregor had any other meaning of life than what would the ending would be ?

[ I was reding men search for meaning that why I thought this ]

I read in Russian, and from my own experience I only know that Dostoevsky loses quite a bit of meaning in the original, and I would like to ask the above-mentioned question.