Kafta vs Woolf and Hemingway
As I was reading The Metamorphosis, I reached the conclusion that Kafta's style of writing was a combination of Woolf and Hemingway's writing style. Allow me to explain.
At first I was confused as to whether or not Kafta was using free indirect discourse. So I brought it up in class very briefly and had it confirmed that, yes, it seems that Kafta is indeed using free indirect discourse.And that's when Woolf came to mind. Woolf and Kafta both use free indirect discourse in their narratives. They also both do not include much dialogue; and both of them have relatively long and "descriptive" (maybe "deep") sentences.
But Kafka also has some Hemingway factors in his novel. I think the big thing was that The Metamorphosis stays in the mind of one character (Gregor) just as The Sun Also Rises stays with Jake. The Metamorphosis is almost but not quite in first person. And maybe The Metamorphosis also has some aspects of the iceberg principle. For example, Kafta writes," Finally, in his despair, as the entire room started to spin around him, he fell onto the middle of the large table. A short time elapsed." Kafta likes to skip around in time, just how Hemingway did not describe Jakes's crying, he just goes straight from the start of the crying to the end. Another thing that Kafta and Hemmingway have in common is that they both have unreliable narrators. By staying with Gregor POV during the free indirect discourse, Kafta shows us characters through Gregor's opinions and then Kafta writes those opinions to be fact so is become harder for us to understand any other character's point of view. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake can never be our reliable narrator as he narrates in first person and starts off the book with an opinion about Cohn's jew-ness. He tries but fails at being the non-bias reporter.
In conclusion, When you add Woolf and Hemingway you get Kafta...almost. You also need to add a dash of crazy weird.
At first I was confused as to whether or not Kafta was using free indirect discourse. So I brought it up in class very briefly and had it confirmed that, yes, it seems that Kafta is indeed using free indirect discourse.And that's when Woolf came to mind. Woolf and Kafta both use free indirect discourse in their narratives. They also both do not include much dialogue; and both of them have relatively long and "descriptive" (maybe "deep") sentences.
But Kafka also has some Hemingway factors in his novel. I think the big thing was that The Metamorphosis stays in the mind of one character (Gregor) just as The Sun Also Rises stays with Jake. The Metamorphosis is almost but not quite in first person. And maybe The Metamorphosis also has some aspects of the iceberg principle. For example, Kafta writes," Finally, in his despair, as the entire room started to spin around him, he fell onto the middle of the large table. A short time elapsed." Kafta likes to skip around in time, just how Hemingway did not describe Jakes's crying, he just goes straight from the start of the crying to the end. Another thing that Kafta and Hemmingway have in common is that they both have unreliable narrators. By staying with Gregor POV during the free indirect discourse, Kafta shows us characters through Gregor's opinions and then Kafta writes those opinions to be fact so is become harder for us to understand any other character's point of view. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake can never be our reliable narrator as he narrates in first person and starts off the book with an opinion about Cohn's jew-ness. He tries but fails at being the non-bias reporter.
In conclusion, When you add Woolf and Hemingway you get Kafta...almost. You also need to add a dash of crazy weird.
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