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Samsa in Love

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11 views21 pages

Samsa in Love

Uploaded by

Roya Naderi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Samsa In Love

Haruki Murakami
1.
Summary

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A sequel to and a subversion of
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis
“He woke to discover that he had undergone a
metamorphosis and become Gregor Samsa.”

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“Samsa had no idea where he was, or what he
should do. All he knew was that he was now a
human whose name was Gregor Samsa. And
how did he know that? Perhaps someone had
whispered it in his ear while he lay sleeping?
But who had he been before he became Gregor
Samsa? What had he been?”

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Learning to maneuver the human body

Samsa crawls out of bed, stumbling around as he


learns to stand on two legs

It’s all very inconvenient

As he stands up naked, he realizes with worry that


the human body has no means of self-defense.
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 Clumsily, making a lot of commotion, he makes his way to the door and
finally down the stairs where he finds a curious scene:

“A glass vase bearing a dozen lilies occupied the center of


the table. Four places were set with napkins and cutlery,
untouched, by the look of it. It seemed as though people
had been sitting down to eat their breakfast a few
minutes earlier, when some sudden and unforeseen
event sent them all running of. What had happened?
Where had they gone? Or where had they been taken?
Would they return to eat their breakfast? But Samsa had
no time to ponder such questions.”

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Perhaps this Gregor Samsa is really
Gregor Samsa, come back from being a
bug (or the dead). Locked away in his
family’s past, here they have heard him
emerging, and they’ve fled the house.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

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Time for an interesting twist:
 The story turn into a love story when a hunchbacked young woman
comes to the house to fix a lock

 Because she’s a hunchback in a brassiere, she writhes her arms, bug-


like, a few times.

 Essentially, Samsa falls in love with her.

 He’s extremely interested in what she knows of the world, and is


sexually attracted to her.

 Suddenly, being human isn’t such a9ridiculous proposition.


to the Insect and Back:
From Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” to a Reversal
Replica: Haruki Murakami’s “Samsa in Love”

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• Comparison:
This story is simpler than Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and focuses on
absurdist humor, neglecting the tragic aspects.

• Despite the disadvantages, Samsa is happy for not being reincarnated as a plant or
another animal species

“He was glad to be human. For sure, it was a great inconvenience


to have to walk on two legs and wear clothes. There were so many
things he didn’t know. Yet had he been a fish or a sunflower, and
not a human being, he might never have experienced this
emotion.”
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The hunchback woman:

• A feminist man-hater
• An improbably ugly Eve
• A source of absurdist humor (being disturbed by her brassiere, wriggles &
twists about bug-like)
• The woman “toils up the stairs much like a crawling insect.”, “wriggles” and
“twists about”
• The two have at least one feature in common
• She provokes Samsa’s erection, which revolts her
• He cannot explain his erection, nor connect with any feeling for the girl
• He wishes she would come again to talk to him and provide him with
information about the unknown world surrounding him.
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“The only thing he knew for certain was that
he wanted to see that hunchbacked girl
again. To sit face-to-face and talk to his
heart’s content. To unravels the riddles of
the world with her.”

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• Love Story Not Present:
There's no romantic connection between Samsa and the deformed locksmith girl.

• Focus on Sensations:
The story explores Samsa's discovery of basic human sensations:
touch, hunger, and sexual arousal.

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• These absurdist Adam without memories and deformed Eve are placed
in an anti-Eden, a deserted world, lacking people

• Adam starts his world discovery: war, desertion by his family,


occupation by foreign troops and etc.

• Samsa needs to meet the locksmith girl again:


rather than a love tryst, he needs to talk and receive explanations
about tanks, brassiere, locks, God, a lot of new strange things he
wishes to learn about.

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 Magic realism, playing on the “metaphorical”, stems from the need to conceptualize and
to give a meaning to the very gist of one’s existence and the surroundings, as in myths.

 Magic realism: an attempt to rationalize and provide alternative ways to resist to these
“unknowable” and “unchangeable” ways of existing within a dreamlike framework.

 Hence, Samsa can be seen as a new Adam who restarts life; Samsa comes to
consciousness as a naked man freed from hurtful memories as a bug; he is purified with a
completely blank mind, a tabula rasa, indeed; he does not know where he is or who he is.

 He is in a world where things are “falling apart” – very likely to be replaced by a new
design-. He is almost a perfect representation of Adam

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 Fortunately and good for humanity, his sexual instincts respond affirmatively

 They decide to meet again leaving a hopeful prospective for the future of humanity.

 They seem to be the renewed and potential Adam and Eve for future generations.

 Murakami creates his own myth by bringing Samsa back from death like Lazarus almost a
hundred years later.

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Is it possible to read it as Murakami’s confidence in humanity to remake or reconstruct itself?
Or is it a clue for an eternal happy ending on behalf of humanity?

 It is a demoralizing and disheartening note for the future of humanity underlying the
imperfection and weakness of human beings;

 Both characters are physically defected and they are aware of each other’s physical flaws.

 Samsa conceptualizes that there is something wrong with the young girl’s body, and he
compares him to “a crawling insect”, which ironically reminds him something and is familiar.

 Perhaps this is the reason why he, at once, feels attracted to the young girl;

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A Reinvention
of Humanity

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