"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. "(1)
For an opening, this first sentence of the novella is pretty hard to beat for sheer absurdity. The idea of waking up as an insect is so extraordinary that you might find yourself re-reading the sentence, trying to figure out if there's anything in those "unsettling dreams" that precipitated the change. That's part of the game the story plays with you, it makes the reader wonder if people just change overnight and if there has to be a cause. Little does the reader know at the time, but this sentence pretty much sums up the entire story's structure. The whole novella follows the same type of questioning and confusing language. It makes the reader use their imagination as to whether Gregor's change is real or just in his dreams, and also to imagine what bug Gregor resembles. The picture resembles what I imagined Gregor to look like when waking up as a bug.
1 comment:
You definitely showed how absurdism permeates the novel right from the opening! However, I was hoping to see a quote about your choice book from the Oprah presentation.
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