Kafka's Metamorphosis Comparative Essay

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Creepy Crawlers Done Two Ways How do you feel when you read a story? Can you visualize what’s happening? Can you almost hear the sounds being described, or feel the the things depicted throughout the book? The way an author chooses to write their story and convey what things are like always has a huge effect on how you feel and what you can visualize while reading. This is called descriptive writing, and it is used to tell how something feels, sounds, tastes, smells, looks like, and so on. In the book The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, there is no exception to this style of writing as Kafka takes us through the transformation of Gregor Samsa, a human-turned-giant bug overnight. But what about a story that lacks in not only description, but most words altogether? Take for example, the graphic novel adaptation of The Metamorphosis, by Peter Kuper. Though Kuper keeps the words to a minimum, it accurately illustrates the story, quite literally, might I add. While very different styles of storytelling, both get the job done well, and with a few similarities. One of the elements that is so wonderful in Kafka’s…show more content…
In spite of the fact that Kafka and Kuper’s methods of narrating are drastically different, both of them use subtle techniques that show this change in Gregor. In keeping with the previous use of pictures in Kuper’s graphic novel, he uses a different type of text and a differently drawn speech bubble to separate between Gregor’s voice and the rest of his family and his boss’s voice. Kafka, however, writes that Gregor notices a difference in his voice, saying “it could hardly be recognized as the voice he had before” and talking about an “uncontrollable squeaking” mixed in with his normal voice. Kafka and Kuper depict the same thing in very different ways, but the message stays the same in both versions of the

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