Metamorphosis

After speaking with a couple of my friends about Franz Kafka, I was very interested in reading Metamorphosis because Kafka is well known for his original ideas (to say the least). I definitely thought Metamorphosis was different, I enjoyed describing the short story to friends and family because people don't tend to imagine a person-turned-insect so calm about the fact that [he] is a bug and worried about his family...

The short was entertaining but also quite serious. Many people have written about the hierarchal conflicts involved in the story and how the familial hierarchy is put to right when Gregor becomes an insect and his father is forced to start working again and leave his practically comatose lifestyle, but I think it is also important to see that the story is very much about the decisions people make. People either accept their situation (as Gregor did) and are squished like a bug in the process OR they decide to act (as Gregor's father and the rest of the Samso family did) and realize that they can grasp at a better life and prosper.

I was honestly a bit upset when the family reacted as they did and began to completely ignore and shame a member of their family, but I suppose that reaction is important because we need to think about the people we may inadvertently treat like "vermin". Do we stand aside and watch those struggling through a sad and difficult time or do we help them dig themselves out of that hole?

Although I'm not altogether sure about how I can expand on some of these ideas, I'm looking forward to seeing how they will develop.

Psychological Ruin of Dorian Gray

As previously stated, I do not think that Harry is to blame for Dorian's behavior. Harry only awakens in Dorian the "degenerate, rotten" person within. I think that person within was created by Dorian's grandfather and from the very beginning Dorian has lived his life of debauchery owning up to the image that his grandfather created. His relationship to Sibyl Vane was similar to that of his mother to a poor man, the murder of Basil symbolizing and indeed signifying for Dorian, the murder of his evil grandfather.

He hated his grandfather (wincing at the utterance of his name by a household servant) and Harry's influence forced him to remember that "there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now."