Examples Of Existentialism In The Metamorphosis

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The Metamorphosis Essay
Franz Kafka story The Metamorphosis tells the story of Gregor Samsa and how his life gets turned around. Gregor was a traveling merchant who works to provide for his family. In the book it seems that his family is taking advantage of his selflessness and tells him that they need him and that he's needs to provide for them. Because of this, Gregor is not allowed to make his own decisions and think about what he wants from life. He doesn’t have time to give meaning to a meaningless life. Throughout the story there are many examples of the existentialism and how Gregor
In The Metamorphosis Gregor is selfless to a point where he makes almost no decisions for himself. His family dictates his decisions and he does what they say because he feels like he owes them something. It is not until he goes through a radical change, literally turning into a cockroach, that he stands up for himself . Up until this point he has been living in bad faith. By living in bad faith he is not able to make meaning for himself in a meaningless world. Bad faith is the refusal to confront facts. As Jean-Paul Sartre says, people start to live in bad faith when they are pressured by social forces to adopt false values. False values are values that you have not come up …show more content…
Gregor does not do this and instead listens to others way of giving the world a meaning. They were just trying to think of a way to cope with an absurd meaningless life for themselves and by doing this, Gregor is giving himself no meaning. When he is transformed it is symbolic of what he was doing before this change, which was basically living without a purpose. He continually cries into a world of no meaning with no answers. In an absurd world there aren't any right or wrong answers, which ever one you choose is the right one, and by choosing nothing for himself he is throwing himself into a meaningless life that can drive one to
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