Essay on Comparison Of Kafka S Metamorphosis And Dali S The Metamorphosis Of Narcissus

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Comparison of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Dali's "The Metamorphosis of Narcissus"

The painting that I chose to compare to the novel Metamorphosis, by

Franz Kafka, was painted in 1937 by Salvatore Dali. Dali is an established

Surrealist painter, who, like Kafka, explored his own psyche and dreams in his

work. Dali invented a process, called the "paranoiac critical method", which is

used in this painting, to assist his creative process. As Dali described it,

his aim in painting was "to materialize the images of concrete irrationality

with the most imperialistic fury of precision...in order that the world of

imagination and of concrete irrationality may be as objectively evident...as

that of the exterior world of phenomenal reality."1

The rich landscape, seems to be limitless in detail. Dali rendered

every detail of this landscape with precise accuracy, striving to make his

paintings as realistic as possible.

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a beautiful young youth, who fell in

love with his own reflection, and then drowned while trying to embrace himself.

His body was never recovered, but a flower, which was named after him was. The

left side of this painting shows the kneeling Narcissus, outlined by the craggy

rocks of what could only be Cape Creus's. On the right side of the painting, the

scene has morphed into a more idyllic and classical scene, in which the

kneeling Narcissus has become the statue of a hand, holding a cracked egg, from

which emerges The Narcissus flower.

This painting reminded me of the first chapter of Metamorphosis, where

the main character, Gregor Samsa, first realizes that he is confronted with a

ludicrous fate in the form of a gigantic insect. In both Kafka's and Dali's

work, I noticed that they both implement a certain "receding" technique. Dali

tends to put an object (In this case, Narcissus) In the foreground, and the

background of the painting tends to be very crisp and detailed, yet unimportant,

compared to Narcissus. I feel the same way about Gregor, I see Kafka writing

this story with mainly Gregor in mind, as the main character and narrator.

Kafka puts this puzzled victim in the story as a clerk, yet that element of the

story tends to receded in to the plot of the story. In a way, this technique

seems to intensify the scene, which later leads up to Gregor's rejection by his

family, and himself.

Another similarity between this scene and the painting, is the fact

that main ‘character's' in the foreground, do not move, they only grow. Gregor

did not get out of bed the first morning of his metamorphosis, yet he did change.

In both halves of Dali's painting, Narcissus's position does not move, yet he

also grows. What is interesting about both works is that they can both be

perceived differently each time I see them. When I first read Metamorphosis, I

did not realize that Gregor was laying motionless in bed, until a second

reading. I had a similar experience with Dali's "The Metamorphosis of

Narcissus". I first saw this painting when I was on vacation in London four

years ago, at a Dali art exhibit. My first impression of this was simply a man

kneeling down in the water, who in the other half of...

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