{"id":36,"date":"2004-02-15T21:37:02","date_gmt":"2004-02-16T02:37:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/index.php\/were-i-a-dung-beetle\/"},"modified":"2004-02-15T21:37:02","modified_gmt":"2004-02-16T02:37:02","slug":"were-i-a-dung-beetle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/15\/were-i-a-dung-beetle\/","title":{"rendered":"Were I a Dung Beetle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today I read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mala.bc.ca\/~johnstoi\/stories\/kafka-E.htm\"><i>Metamorphosis<\/i><\/a> by Franz Kafka. It is a story of a boy who wakes up one morning to discover that he&#8217;s changed from a traveling business man, providing for his entire family, to a large dung beetle.  The change doesn&#8217;t shock him too much at first&#8211;he&#8217;s more concerned about being late for work, but later the full impact of it settles in as he discovers his family no longer views him as they previously did.<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed it.  Kafka does a great job of making the absurd seem completely  normal&#8211; reading the story, you feel as if turning into a beetle were something that could possibly happen to you tomorrow morning.  The descriptions are vivid&#8211;he makes it easy to feel what it would be like to be a dung beetle&#8211;everything from the physical aspects of learning to walk as a beetle to the alienation one might feel upon suddenly metamorphosing  into a large insect.  It&#8217;s also very interesting how he describes the process of losing touch with humanity and gradually starting to think like an insect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I read Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. It is a story of a boy who wakes up one morning to discover that he&#8217;s changed from a traveling business man, providing for his entire family, to a large dung beetle. The change doesn&#8217;t shock him too much at first&#8211;he&#8217;s more concerned about being late for work, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppj2P-A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}