Kafka, Eliot and Me

Question: What does it mean to be human?

Intro

What does it mean to be human? A question that people have been asking for thousands of years and still nobody has an answer. Both the novella Metamorphosis and the poem The Love song of Alfred J Prufrock explore this question in separate ways. I believe that the love song of Alfred J Prufrock focuses more on looking at how our actions affect our humanity and how each experience shapes who we are. Where as Metamorphosis focuses much more on the element of what it really means to be human.

Metamorphosis run down

The story is about a young man who has to support his family after the failure of his father’s business. The story follows the man’s transformation, as he wakes up one morning only to find him self transformed into a huge cockroach. From there on it describes in detail as he feels guilt that his family now has to work, and he emotionally deteriorates. His family slowly comes to disregard him and see him as a burden. Until eventually he decides he is too much of a burden for the family and kills him self to help them.

Metamorphosis and humanity

The story explores in many different ways what it means to be human. I will touch on some of these. I personally find that the story follows one of the most universal points of being human; in fact it explores two of them. While reading the story I found that Gregor shows in great detail that responsibility and identity play a huge part in what makes us human. The whole story shows multiple examples for both of these two principles of human existence.

Responsibility

Gregor feels hugely responsible to support his family as the breadwinner. This role bears so much importance to him that it makes him who he is. It is a huge part of his humanity that when he starts to feel over burdened by it he quite literally stops being a human and starts to become a cockroach.

Identity

This topic is not explored in as much detail in the book as responsibility but still carries some weight both in the book and in life. In the book this theme of mental and physical identity is woven in between the lines of text as Gregor turns more and more into a cockroach he loses his human qualities. An example of this is his taste of food changes, he goes from eating normal human food to only being able to enjoy rotten food.

Personal view

I have a very narrow view on what it means to be human on an emotional level. I believe to be human you only have to be able to love, feel happiness, feel pain and to have a purpose in life whatever that may be. All of these things combined give you an identity, which makes you human. I’m able to do or have all of these criteria so I consider myself to have an identity, to be unique in my own way and there is no one else like me. Yes, I have faults such as being loud and annoying or that I eat way too much to often, but at the same time I see my self as an honest, laid back funny guy and all these things give me an identity. If I lose the identity or purpose or it begins to change I start to lose my human qualities and what makes me me. So, altogether what I’m trying to say is that the most important thing about being a human is to be unique.