Ambiguity of Characters in Franz Kafka’s ‘in the Penal Colony’ and ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’

The narrator of Sophie’s Choice, Stingo, meets a young Polish woman at the Pink Palace in Brooklyn after World War II. She has a dark past due to some horrendous experiences during Nazi occupation in Poland and time in Auschwitz. It is important to take a critical look at her fictitious narrative and deem whether Styron has produced a plausible character. Also, it is key to assess if the stories told by Sophie attribute positively to real accounts of the Holocaust without trivializing the history in order to create a popular

Peter Shaffer and Franz Kafka, the authors of Equus and Metamorphosis, reveal through their main characters’ struggles how society’s oppression causes a loss of identity. This oppression is caused by society’s obsession with what it believes to be normal and how society’s beliefs drive it to conform those who don’t fit its normal image. The two authors use their characters to symbolize the different views and judgments of society. And based on these judgments, the authors use two different types of oppression that cause different outcomes. Finally, this essay will reveal how the two authors use their characters to drain the protagonist’s identity to show society’s desire to conform.

Franz Kafka’s trademark is ridiculing his and the society’s blatant stories in subtle manner. With the help of paradigms what can be seen is that Franz Kafka’s use of humour in oddly places to clarify the asymmetry of the organized world and heightens the tension. It was also used to create even greater gaps both in scene and story line, to further stress the blackness felt in many of his stories. Studying his works it’s evident that Franz Kafka saw humor not only as a defence against the pain and anguish he felt inflicted upon him by the outside world, but also against the pain he rained upon himself. This technique was used to stress on the horrors of the big bad world. Although there have been resemblances of the protagonists’ character traits to his own self, he has brought out not only his own problems but on how people magnify and in

In the American memoir, Night, Nobel Peace Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel constructs a story about the horrific events he endured during the Holocaust. In the pages of this memoir, he portrays the life of Eliezer, a child born Jewish. In the later chapters of the book, Eliezer endures the tragic hanging of a pipel who lost his life for not giving up the names of the inmates that worked to sabotage the power plant at Buna, a forced labor camp in Germany. The guards forced Eliezer and his father to walk past the child as he hung from the gallows stuck between life and death. The death of the child signifies the death of Eliezer’s faith. The author used this position in the memoir to signify the end of the main character’s religious views, which makes this the climax of the book. The climax fits into the structure of the memoir at this point by staying consistent in word choice and advancing the plot further. The use of the appeals and tone also ties this scene into the plot. However, each translation utilizes these devices differently. The scholar’s translation focuses on ethos, logos, and a helpless tone. Marion’s translation uses pathos and a bitter tone. Marion’s version more effectively uses the appeals and tone because it conveys more emotion to the reader.

This article by Walter H. Sokel claims that the metamorphosis Gregor goes through gives him the chance to be rebellious. Sokel highlights that after Gregor is changed into a cockroach he also changes mentally, which affects his actions.

The topics “Can You Use that Word in a Sentence,” and Racial Representation is significant throughout the book Long Division written by Kiese Laymon. The characters in this book will have to face racism and learn to defy racial representations, especially during the scene of the quiz contest. Overall, this essay will tackle the importance of language in the book Long Division and analyze the actions of the characters and the emotions they display. This essay will examine the words written and the racism experienced during the period using the two sources and research made to understand the importance of language in racism. Long Division, the book written by Kiese Laymon is an intriguing and gripping novel. It starts off with the main character Citoyen “City” Coldson a fourteen year-old boy; he participates in a nationwide televised quiz contest. However noticing that the contest is extremely racist, his outburst on stage goes viral. Shortly, City moves to live with his grandmother. He’s been given a book, before leaving, titled “Long Division”. The main character of the book has the same name as City yet it is set in 1985. A young girl named Baize Shephard has been missing in City’s new community. Yet, when Baize Shephard appears as a character in City’s strange book, both stories link and converge together. Citoyen “City” Coldson and LaVander Peeler are the only two black participants in the “Can You Use that Word in a Sentence” contest. There were many scenes that

Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night (1958), follows a young Elie who discovers that there are detrimental consequences to standing by inequity and beneficial effects to taking action to the subjugation of an individual. While integrating anaphor and metaphor, Wiesel reinforces his theme by illustrating the environment of detestable concentration camps in Poland to initiate the conflict of the struggle between protecting others over personal interests. His objective is to disseminate his unjust experience to ensure society never loses knowledge of the atrocity and to prevent repeated history. Through unveiling his arduous journey, Wiesel creates an atmosphere of despondency and regret for readers to encourage standing up to injustice. In addition,

Under the rule of the Nazis, and in the battle between life and death, the caring, courageous, and thoughtful Elie Wiesel recounts his life events in the memoir Night. As a Jewish boy growing up in Sighet, Transylvania during World War II, Wiesel experiences firsthand the cruelty of mankind. The author depicts the unpleasant living conditions contributing to the starvation of the prisoners in the concentration camps and the violence in the struggle to survive. Throughout Wiesel’s writing, there are a variety of literary techniques to describe the horrors he has experienced. Elie Wiesel utilizes figurative language to describe the men and their actions, and he writes a flash-forward to complement the greater ideas about humanity and savagery

Clive Barnett, from University of Reading, Department of Geography, emphasizes that “Coetzee’s fiction has been inserted into dominant moral representations of apartheid” (300). Where, everything on this novel can be related to apartheid South Africa. The white professor, and his daughter represents the disgrace and shame of whites. What happened to them, the attack and Lucy’s rape, represents the punishment to the white community for the crimes they have committed against the black community. Also, Lucy’s reaction to the event was to not press charges against the rapists, “This is my life. I am the one who has to live here. What happened to me is my business, mine alone, not yours, and if there is one right I have it is the right not to be put on trial” (Disgrace 133), and stay in her house and face the consequences. Moreover, Lucy thought that was “the price to pay” in order for her to stay there, and J. M. Coetzee quoted in Disgrace:

In this essay we will be discussing Paul Stopforth’s ‘Interrogators’ and William Kentridge’s ‘Felix in Exile’ which are both responding to apartheid. In the midst of a resistance and revolution in South Africa, not only did many heroic, iconic figures get killed during protest, but many innocent people (Klotz, 1995). Both Stopforth and Kentridge seek to expose this violence in their art and are at the same time challenged to respond to their own emotional sensitivity caused by trauma and shock they experienced.

Kafka is known for his highly symbolic and oblique style of writing. It is no surprise that several of his pieces contain the same major themes, just in different settings. The fact that he repeats his styles only makes the message that he is trying to convey much stronger. In both “The Metamorphosis” and “A Hunger Artist”, the main

“The Hunger Artist” by Franz Kafka, is about a man who self mutilated by starvation in attempt to be recognized, honored, and accepted while gaining fame. As noted on The National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ self mutilation by starvation was a common form of suicide in concentration camps for prisoners who wished to remove themselves from the severely harsh environment. The irony of “The Hunger Artist” is that Kafka wrote the story in the year of 1922. However, the Holocaust did not begun until the year of 1933 and ended in 1945. Decades later, the message from “The Hunger Artist” is continuously being retold with the existence of vanity and peer pressure included.

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians, the Magistrate comes to discover the humanity of the barbarian through his interactions with the blind girl, which eventually leads him to learn about the nature of his own humanity. Although the Magistrate is more lenient on the Barbarians than Colonel Joll, he still unknowingly objectifies them, while placing himself above them. It is only when he is imprisoned that he comes to realize the fragility of his own humanity. Ultimately Coetzee uses the magistrate’s journey from empirical leader to broken and fearful prisoner to express that peace and stability between people can only be obtained when all humanity is valued.

In Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee introduces the controversial idea of civilized and barbaric through a nameless empire. The novel features the first person narration of an unnamed magistrate who becomes conflicted upon his duties after meeting Colonel Joll. As the antagonist of the novel, Colonel Joll coincides with the depraved actions of the Empire, one of the most prominent being imperialism. Later in the novel, the Magistrate also encounters an unnamed barbarian girl, who he brings into his home and claims responsibility for. With the intention of learning about her past and about the pain inflicted by his Empire, he aims to to extract the “truth” through means of

No person that leads a normal life is likely to write a metaphorical yet literal story about a man transforming into a bug. That being said, no person that leads a normal life is likely to alter a genre as much as Franz Kafka did. With the unusual combination of declining physical health and a resurgence of spiritual ideas, Franz Kafka, actively yearning for life, allowed his mind to travel to the places that his body could not take him. In his recurring themes of guilt, pain, obscurity, and lucidity, are direct connections to his childhood and daily life. His family dynamic, infatuation with culture and theater, and his personal illnesses all shaped his imagination into the poignant yet energetic thing that