Themes in Three Literary Works

The themes of alienation, isolation, lack of recognition, and meaningless of existence have different emphases in works of Kafka, Mann, and Camus. However, what they share is a strong sense of a failure to belong to the world in which they find themselves. The profoundly introspective explorations by Kafka, Mann, and Camus suggest to some degree a working-out of the notion that solutions to major problems of existence lie within the Self. But a self that cannot find a suitable place in its own environment is doomed.

In Kafka's "Metamorphosis," the failure is principally one of perception, not of the physical reality in which Gregor finds himself but rather of his emotional environment. Gregor is both isolated from and subject to the whim of his external universe. He is at pains to get to work on time, to please his family. When he has turned into a beetle, his alienation arises from the disgust of others. But in fact he has been isolated all along, and the metamorphosis is just the manifestation of his inner life.

Gregor has never asserted or more exactly inserted his selfhood into his experience of the world. He does not experience injustice at being imprisoned by his family, after the transformation any more than he objected to being imprisoned as the family breadwinner before it. For example, he "of course" will not ask his father directly the status of assets of the failed family business. Instead, Gregor "set to work with unusual ardor and almost overnight had beocm

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s life and work. To the extent Asch has become so lionized that the companionship of others seems beneath his notice, his isolation is willful, but the story implies that dissociation from the authentic artistic/aesthetic enterprise has fueled isolation from authentic life altogether. It is important that Asch is motivated to travel by disquiet, which degenerates into foolish self-destruction. In isloation, Asch conceives a passion for the boy Tadzio, a flirtation from afar but having enormous consequence for Asch's consciousness. Unable to share the passion, alienated from the hotel full of strangers, Asch constructs a reality and meaning for his one-sided flirtation. When he realizes that Venice is diseased, he flirts briefly with confronting Tadzio's mother to warn her of the cholera. But on the very point of engagement with the woman, he, the "entire stranger," retreats into the aesthetic distance that has fed a solitary sexual gratification. As if he is plotting a one of his novels and not living a life, he chooses instead to have "shared the city's secret," discarding the role of sentimental hero in contemplation of the desolate image of a decaying Venice (Mann 1078-9). That choice is his doom, for in his determination to

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