Özet:

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” which holds transformation as a unifying element in his stories examines a large number of themes including identity, immortality, violence, punishment, reward and morality. Punishment which is one of the most common motifs, particularly stands out in the myth of Daedalus and Icarus where a son faces tragedy for not taking his father’s advice. Similar motifs of change and punishment appear in Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis in which a salesman named Gregor Samsa turns into a verminous bug, W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” poem where indifference and punishment go hand in hand and finally in Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus painting wherein unresponsiveness is depicted as punishment. The aim of this article is to analyse the common motif of “punishment” in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” with Pieter Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and to investigate behavioural characteristics of the protagonist in both Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” according to Sigmund Freud’s theory of “accidents” in order to uncover a connection between the common motif punishment and the theory of accidents in which essentially assume there are none.

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