Franz Kafka - Metamorphoses
This text details the experience of Gregor Samsa waking up in the body of an insect. It consistently avoids explanation and eludes meaning; the reader, like Gregor, is simply forced into the situation and made to accept a new normality. Gregor's concerns are not his transformation, but how this will effect the established norms around him - his family, his job, his society. Gregor's existence becomes a terrible burden upon his family; his father views him with disgust, seeing his transformation as one of body and person, while his sister pities the changed Gregor, caring for him and bringing him food. The text interrogates questions of physicality and normality, abd to what extent relationships balance upon the thin veneer of social conformity. The boundary between interiority and exteriority is materialised, and the text explicitly, yet without conlusion, probes how identity is formed by the self and the external 'other'. This links to other texts such as Descartes and Lock with the understanding of being and conciousness, and further connects to Butler and Beauvoir with questions of the body.