"Gregor Samsa was right. We are all bugs."

How Kafka presents Gregor's family and boss in Metamorphosis is incredible, in terms of how fucking awful they are, especially when in contrast to Gregor's loyalty to his parents and drive and desire to do this thing for them. His manager, when yelling to Gregor behind the door, " 'I thought I knew you as a calm, reasonable person, and now you appear suddenly to want to start parading around in weird moods... I see here your unimaginable pig headedness, and I am totally losing any desire to speak up for you in the slightest. And your position is not at all the most secure. Originally I intended to mention all this to you privately, but since you are letting me waste my time here uselessly, I don’t know why the matter shouldn’t come to the attention of your parents as well. Your productivity has also been very unsatisfactory recently' " (Kafka 5). We see the boss shrieking at Gregor, being mean, and terrible, and condescending. Gregor responds to his manager with, " 'There is really no basis for the criticisms which you’re now making against me. Nobody has said a word to me about that. Perhaps you have not read the latest orders which I sent in. Besides, now I’m setting out on my trip on the eight o’clock train... I will be at the office in person right away. Please have the goodness to say that and to convey my respects to the Chief' ” (Kafka 5) He is cordial, and polite, and keeps his head cool, and defends himself quietly and civilly. His boss yells and screams and insults, and Gregor responds with kindness and gentle retaliation.

Gregor's parents, also, are terrible people. They're lazy, and will not pay off their own debt. They even have servants of their own, whom they pay instead of paying off their debt. Gregor is forced to work indentured for many years to pay off the debt. As he sits, mulling, in his bed, "If I didn’t hold back for my parents’ sake, I’d have quit ages ago. I would’ve gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart. Once I’ve got together the money to pay off my parents’ debt to him—that should take another five or six years—I’ll do it for sure" (Kafka 1). He will have to work years of his life at a job he absolutely despises, underneath a boss whom he hates with a passion. But even through this, even though his parent's debt is his parents' fault, he even seems to consider the debt his own, his responsibility. As he talks to his boss, after they get into his room, " 'I am really so indebted to Mr. Chief—you know that perfectly well. On the other hand, I am concerned about my parents and my sister' " (Kafka 7). He considers the debt to be his own, and he's even worried about his family, despite the fact that he has been turned into a bug and is being forced to work against his will by his parents. The debt is not his own, and yet he sees his own responsibility to pay it off.

"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."

Franz Kafka was born on July third, 1882 to Hermann and Julie Kafka. They were a middle-class Jewish family living in Prague. His first language was German, but he was also almost fluent in Czech and later on in life he became adequate in French. He attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, a boys' primary school, from the years 1889 to 1893. He was admitted to Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, an academic secondary school, and attended there for the full eight years until 1901. He completed his Matura exams in 1901 following his graduation from Altstädter, and was admitted to the Charles University of Prague, where he studied chemistry to begin He switched quickly (after two weeks) to law, a move to appease his father. He obtained his law degree on June 18, 1906 at the age of 23. 

After his graduation, he worked an obligatory year of unpaid service as a law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. On November 1, 1907, he was hired by the  Assicurazioni Generali, an aggressive Italian insurance company. He worked there nearly a year, and according to his correspondences to family, resigned because the hours did not allow him time to work on his writing. He found other work two weeks later at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. From 1912 to 1923, he had three notable love interests, with the third of which he moved into a house in Berlin in order to distance himself from his family's influence to focus on his writing. 

Many of his works, including The Judgement, stemmed directly from his relationship with his overbearing father. He was also influenced from a very young age by one of his high school science teachers, Herr Gotwald. Gottwald was a Darwinist, a Positivist, and an Atheist, as well as being a major player and supporter of the modernist movement in Prague. We see in many of Kafka's protagonists a preoccupation and egocentricity of the self, a staple of the modernist movement's individualistic viewpoint. 

Throughout his life, he suffered from insomnia, migraines, constipation, boils, and other stress related ailments, the most notable of which were severe social anxiety and depression, which he tried to counteract through several naturopathic treatments, the most obvious of which was a vegetarian diet though he was reportedly suicidal throughout his life. He contracted tuberculosis and returned to his hometown Prague, but as it continued to get worse he went to a sanatorium near Vienna for advanced treatment. He eventually subdued to the grip of his tuberculosis in Vienna on June 3, 1924. He was buried back in Prague in the New Jewish Cemetery on June 11, 1924 alongside his parents.

                                                    

Works Cited

Chapman, Jeremy. "Franz Kafka as Modernist." Jeremy Chapman : Montreal Linux Computer                        Consultant. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Mar. 2014.

"Franz Kafka Biography." A Short Biography of Franz Kafka. Franz Kafka Online, n.d. Web. 17 Mar.           2014.

Merriman, C. D. "Franz Kafka." The Literature Network Online. Jalic Inc., 2005. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

Nervi, Mauro. "Kafka's Life (1883-1924)." The Kafka Project. Mauro Nervi, n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2014.

"To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come?"

Dante's Inferno and What Dreams May Come are two very interesting takes on the afterlife. They bear some striking resemblances. Of course, the main difference between they two is that What Dreams May Come deals with not only hell, but heaven, a subject matter not expressed by Dante until his Paradiso. The portrayal of heaven in What Dreams May Come is interesting, in respects to how it deals with 'breaking the news' in a way to the dead soul; starting off with witnessing scenes involving and as a result of the death, and then taking some aspect or passionate aspect of the life and using that as a middle ground before fully being exposed to heaven, in all its majesty; Dante's souls just end up there after their death, like waking up after a long night of partying in some strange place. It's also interesting to see how the house of Chris and Annie is also incorporated into their own personal heavens and hells. The house is an amplified to the maximum positive in Chris's heaven, while it's dilapidated and broken in Annie's hell.

In addition, it is also of note the nature of the two portrayals of heaven and hell. Dante's hell is divided by the actions people did in life, the sins they committed alone dictating the position and punishment of everyone there. At it's most basic level it is judgement based off of actions, and punishment assuming the nature of the actions. In What Dreams May Come, the punishments are more specific. The location in hell is based off of the action, but the judgement, nature, and severity of the punishment is based off of the individual itself. Each punishment is specifically tailored to the subtleties and nuances of each person, rather than a blanket punishment for all people who acted somewhat similarly. And then, in the heaven portrayal of What Dreams May Come, it starts off in a personalized version of heaven, and then as one becomes acclimated, they go and see all the others living in the same place in the blanket fashion of Dante. But the thing about it is, there can never be a perfect paradise with more than one person in it. Every single person's perceived perfection is different. They prefer different things, enjoy different surroundings, listen to different music, eat different food, everything. In order for there ever to be a perfect world, there must be no one else there for which it is perfect. That's why the place Chris begins is the real heaven: he exists in a world created by himself, for himself, that for himself is perfect. But of course his loved ones are not there, and so of course it can never be completely perfect. So the classic portrayals of heaven, including the one in What Dreams May Come, is not heaven at all. The only possible thing that could exist is hell. That is why Dante delves so deeply into its various aspects, more than heaven or purgatory. 

"Betrayal is the only truth that sticks."

One thing that I noticed throughout the Canto presentations were the numerous references to the Battle of Montaperti. It was a battle fought on September 4, 1260 between Florence and Siena in Tuscany. The players were the Guelphs and the Ghibelline. It is infamous for the way the Ghibelline won. A man named Bocca degli Abati was masquerading as a Guelph soldier, but was in reality a member of the Ghibelline. During the course of the battle, Bocca travelled across Ghibelline lines to their leader, Farinata degli Ubertis, at the first sign of a charge. He then snuck back across to his own "side", the Guelph, and cut down the flag bearer, resulting in mass confusion in their forces, and as a result, they fled and more than an estimated 10,000 Guelph soldiers died.
Dante places both Bocca and Farinata in his Divine Comedy. He puts Farinata in the circle of the heretics, in my own Canto, Canto X, as it was revealed years after his death that he was a disbeliever in life after death and a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. He was found guilty of heresy after his death and was sentenced to a posthumous execution (I know, right?) which is basically when they dig the bodies back up and burn them and scatter among the dirt and filth and excrement of the city. Bocca was mentioned in a later Canto, in Canto XXXII, as a betrayer, seeing as he fraudulently behaved as a Guelph soldier for years before betraying the entire army to the Ghibelline in the battle. One of the reasons why Dante included two references to this battle in his comedy was because he was a member of the Guelph party, and this battle was renowned within those two circles, especially as even afterwards the two parties continued to drive each other out of the city of Florence for years tyo come, and the rivalry went deep and long for many years afterward.

"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise"

It really does seem to me like Dante was a very thoughtful person. He was a genius. Everything he wrote carried some form of metaphorical or symbolic weight, and everything and everyone he put in there was put in there for a reason. Now obviously, some of the people were probably put in there as some sort of personal vendetta, and were only placed in various places because Dante did not like them much. But even those people still carried some meaningful weight in their placement in the various parts of hell. And all the people he placed in hell for things they actually did, one would have to be a madman to blatantly condemn so many powerful people. And yet Dante did, and everything he said about them was accurate, and Dante carried his intelligence such that he could justify the placement of various people in hell to the very letter. He was not afraid of the people he put in hell, and was proud and confident in his choices.
Also, the imagination that went into the entire inferno was awesome. Dante was essentially the first person to create a visual for hell. Before him, hell was just an abstract location, but after Dante, the entire landscape of the afterlife was laid out in so much detail that essentially every portrayal in every religion and culture of a hellish or evil-barren afterlife place has been the Dante model. The complicated organization, with all the intricate layers and sections all precisely laid out had to have been planned so diligently and intimately. The design, with the concentric rings all going further down into the depths is genius, with the image of almost a tooth or blade digging into the earth, and then coming out the other side into Purgatorio and Paradiso is great. The detail Dante goes into while describing the landscape, the people, the sights, the sounds, the tortures, is haunting while at the same time enticing. He created an entire world to mirror the evil of this world, and contained in such a place with such detail that no one has questioned it since.