Has anyone read The Metamorphosis by Kafka?

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What was the cockroach's attitude toward sex? Did he have a lot of sex?

I love that book!

I don't think the Gregor Samsa has any sex in the novel. At all. Most of the time he's locked in his room consumed with existential angst about having turned into a cockroach. There are is a Freudian incest subtext (well, sub-subtext) between Gregor and his sister, who grudgingly cares for him. At one point she throws an apple at him (think Eden), and in the last scene she trips over her petticoats in a slightly suggestive way.

Why do you ask?

i think all of Kafka could very well be as-related;

the short stories are especially stunning &
yes The M (Die Verwandlung) is good,

but have you ever read...
i forget the original german title,
in dutch it was Het Hol,
which i would translate as The Burrow

that must be as close (in)to the paranoid mind as one could get

my favourite dutch writer, Simon Vestdijk, was plagued with
depression all his life.
i think he got his first serious one after having published some five novels.
he then tried his hand at a historical novel, The Fifth Seal, on El Greco,
got somewhat lost in a much too long, overly detailed onle descriptive
first chapter & got stuck
i don't know how he ran into Kafka around that time, reading K threw
hi into what i think was his first major depression

few people have ever noticed a remarkable difference in styles between
the static first chapter and the rest of The Fifth Seal, which was written post-
depression, but more importantly post reading Kafka

i wouldn't be surprised if it were The Burrow that did the trick
it's a long time since i read at all though, much longer since Kafka
& and i might have lent it to some non-returnive so&so
- i REALLY resent having just wisely succumbed to my internal censor

I lerv that book. It's so much like my family. I'm the cockroach of course. Such an AS parable.

No I don't think there's any sex in it either. That's life for us cockroaches.

No, none. Gregor is the story of life turned inward, looking too deep.

What he found was what all will find, it is a strange place.

Behind the living, is insect survival, something that lives to stay alive.

Gregor has given up on the distractions of life, withdrawn, to look within.

That is fine, in the values of the universe we are bugs.

He found a truth, but missed the truth of bugs going out to dinner, seeing plays, hearing music, do all the things a bug can do.

He is also Kafka, the writer alone, hardly any contact with the world, to write about it.

The cockroach lives, somewhere, eats, and causes those around to become cockroaches.

Where as brother he should be showing her the world, and to the world, his withdrawal takes her to his isolation, and it is the nature of a female roach to reproduce.

Life at it's lowest is accepted, they live where they can, eat what is available, and will reproduce with whoever is around.

A sub plot is that his condition affects others. He has left life, but drags his sister with him.

She did not want to become Mrs. Roach, but roles are put on us by those around.

Alone, locked in his room, he locks her life up too.

Looking too close at life, destroys it's enjoyment for the viewer, and for those around.

"I have never found the kind of food I liked" topic

Gregor is an Aspie. He is the literary projection of Franz Kafka. Kafka himself had issues with the sex act, meaning it disturbed him. Some critics have argued the only sex Gregor (and by extension Franz) had was of the manual single-handed kind.

Biographies about Kafka and his relatively few published works abound and speak volumes about this great writer. Analyses of his stories are still ongoing, and fill more volumes than his literary output, inspiring other writers (this poster included) to emulate his ideas in their own short stories and 'Franz fan fiction'. His friend Max Brod was wise to not destroy the brilliant stories and other correspondence as Kafka had ordered shortly before the latter's death.

Other posters also have interesting ideas about Franz/Gregor.

Thanks for posting JWRed. I hope you find and read other interesting works by K.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4ixGNMPAi8w

Kafka is remarkable.

I've read it, it's a haunting story, but I don't see anything sexual in it either.
There's some good commentary here already, but I'll add that Kafka was writing in the dawning of the modern industrial age, and the idea that man is becoming more like a machine is a prominent metaphor. The insect is like a robot, in that it has multiple legs, and it's concerned mostly with working. He's dedicated his whole life to work as a salesman, so he's become like a machine in that sense.
Other Kafka works also involve this theme; and the movie 'Kafka' is a great exploration of people getting caught in the gears of progress.

'Why should today be different from any other?' - why should we even have dreams, huh?

That quote appears in the film, here is a link:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102181/

There's some random sex in The Trial and in The Castle he gets married if I remember right but I'm not too sure I know what it signifies other than it's own sheer void pointlessness.
Read them long ago.

I see what you're saying, but I don't think there's a lot of evidence to support that theory. The whole 'stages of life' arguement can be applied to almost any story; ie people and things change with time.
IMO, Samsa isn't the everyman across history, he's the everyman of his time, which is defined by the rise of industry. He is the workhorse of his family. The fact that he has to be up before dawn every day, that he has to go to all the right houses and can't miss his trains, the fact that he's never been sick before, all point to him leading an automated life. Meanwhile, his parents and sister don't turn into insects because they have a bit more freedom, and therefore more variation in life. Ie, they are alive, thinking and feeling (which is the purpose of the end where the sister stretches herself in the sun), while he might as well be a robot; his life would be the same.
Being a salesman, a factory worker, or a clerk like Kafka was, they all fall into the same category. It is repetitive work that doesn't require thinking or feeling or skill of any sort, other than what you're 'programmed' to do.

I'm going to read it soon as part of a group project.
I'm looking forward to it.