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Kafka's life story is in great part the key to his ouvre. Born in Prague as the son of well-to-do Jewish parents, he was a pupil at the Gymnasium and thereafter was a student at Prague University, first of chemistry and German language and literature, from which he switched over to law. He made friends with a fellow student, Max Brod, who, after Kafka"s early death, published his friend"s work. Kafka was a jew, and once described himself as "the eternal Jew... wandering senselessly through a senselessly obscene world."1 His life was indeed a kind of wandering in the wilderness. He was, in his own words, "full of childish hopes (particulary as regards women)"; these hopes, however, are"merely mirages born of despair" especially at those times when he was "the wretchedest of creatures in the desert," and Canaan was his only "Promised Land, for no third place exists for mankind."2 He also added in his diary, referring to his miserable life, that he was "as lonely as F.Kafka."3 Kafka scratches the surfece of everyday existence to reveal a world of absurdity and paradox, of aimlessness and futulity, in which man is tormented by an unrevealed and unexplained anxiety. His style is remarkably precise and lucid, despite the grotesque unreality of the occurrences that it is used to describe. His stories, in their combination of clarity and unreality, are masterpieces of dream-fiction. Kafka is known for the visionary character of his novels, stories,parables, and sketches, all of which center on the problematic existence of modern man, including Kafka himself in the person of Joseph K. in The Castle. It is the purpose of the present paper, after this preliminary observation, to undertake a study of Kafka"s famous story, Metamorphosis, with references to Ovid"s Metamorphoses. Lucius" Golden Ass. Miller"s Death of a Salesman. and Tolstoy"s The Death of Ivan llvich. However, on top of all, it will initiate you in to Kafka"s biography, and then will start a discussion of Metamorphosis, which is similar in some ways to the works mentioned.

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