The Death Of Ivan And The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka

Tiffani Cao ENG 2850 Professor Sylvor Self-knowledge Death is an inevitable concern that no one can understand completely. While it has the potential to instill fear, the thought of death also instigates individuals to reflect upon the life he or she has lived. In â€Å"The Death of Ivan Ilych† by Leo Tolstoy and â€Å"The Metamorphosis† by Franz Kafka, the two authors capture this reflecting of life within the lives of Ivan Ilych and Gregor Samsa. Although both Ivan Ilych and Gregor Samsa experience an unfortunate fate of death, the protagonists were able to find self-knowledge through analytical observations of their surroundings and were able to resolve the issues before their death. Before Ivan Ilych accepted his fate of death, he was known as an examining magistrate. Ivan Ilych attended the School of Law assimilating the values and behaviors of bourgeois,’ thus Ilych’s view of a â€Å"perfect† lifestyle consists of being wealthy and achieving high social class. His view is ironic because it contradicts with the natural self and propriety self that he is living in. Ilych imitates the ideals of social acceptability and the proprietary morals of how he must act like. For example, Ilych comments â€Å"What must I do to be like others, to be accepted†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (749). Ilych’s mortality comes from the people around him, thus he has no meaning to his life because he does not have his own idealistic beliefs of what his life should be. Additionally, Ivan Ilych discusses of the matter of when his wife,Show MoreRelatedThe Death Of Ivan Ilych By Leo Tolstoy And Franz Kafka s The Metamorphosis1103 Words   |  5 Pagesout because their plot is both driven by the central character, but also the effect the minor character has on both the central character and the overall plot, those works being â€Å"The Death of Ivan Ilych† by Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka’s â€Å"The Metamorphosis†. â€Å"The Death of Ivan Ilyich† by Leo Tolstoy is about a man (Ivan) in middle age who has lived a â€Å"most simple and most ordinary life and therefor the most terrible† (pg. 1446). He spent his life climbing the social ladder, he married a woman becauseRead MoreSurvival in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn and The Metamorphosis by Kafka1245 Words   |  5 PagesSurvival in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn and The Metamorphosis by Kafka In both One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, written by Solzhenitsyn, and The Metamorphosis, written by Kafka, there were struggles for survival in face of oppression. Both of the protagonists Read MoreAn Existential Crisis2417 Words   |  10 Pagesquestions the very foundations of their life: whether their life has any meaning, purpose, or value. Sometimes there are men who will accept their fate graciously. Two works that depict these ideas are â€Å"The Death of Ivan Ilych† by Leo Tolstoy and â€Å"The Metamorphosis† by Kafka. In both works by Tolstoy and Kafka, the main characters at some point question their lives’ and what life means to them. In order to question one’s life, it would be necessary that one evaluate the decisions they make. A person’s lifeRead MoreBelonging Essay4112 Words   |  17 Pageswikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kite_Runner Hosseini, Khaled A thousand splendid suns AF YA Irving, John The cider house rules AF Ishiguro, Kazuo Never let me go AF Hulme, Keri The bone people AF Jones, Lloyd Mister Pip AF Joyce, James Ulysses AF Kafka, Franz Metamor phosis AF Kesey, Ken One flew over the cuckoo’s nest AF Keneally, Thomas The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith AF King, Stephen Carrie AF Lee, Harper To kill a mockingbird AF YA Li, Yiyun A thousand years of good prayers AF London, Jack White fang AFRead MoreThe Theory, History, and Development of Magical Realism Essay examples3188 Words   |  13 PagesMagical realism is more a literary mode than a distinguishable genre and it aims to seize the paradox of the union of opposites such as time and timelessness, life and death, dream and reality and the pre-colonial past and the post-industrial present. It is characterized by two conflicting perspectives. While accepting the rational view of reality, it also considers the supernatural as a part of reality. The setting in a magical realist text is a normal world with authentic human characters. It isRead MoreExistentialism vs Essentialism23287 Words   |  94 PagesCamus Moving beyond Sartre s existentialism, Camus explored the meaninglessness and absurd nature of the human condition. Many Others Other existential philosophers include  Simone de Beauvoir,  Martin Heidegger,  Karl Jaspers,  Gabriel Marcel  and  Franz Kafka. Existentialist philosophy was also influenced by many other works, including those of  Friedrich Nietzsche, G. W. F. Hegel, Fyodor Dostoevsky and  Edmund Husserl. 1. Sà ¸ren Kierkegaard  (1813–1855) was a Danish philosopher who contributed greatly