Rants and Rambles feat. Some Books

Disclaimer: I've already made a post this week. It's less angry than this. Go read it if you want. Or stick around for some quality anger spurred by Erin's post about what kind of insect Gregor is. When I started reading The Metamorphosis , I imagined Gregor Samsa as some kind of dragonfly. That was just my automatic definition of "insect". Obviously, I was slightly confused when Gregor didn't just fly out of bed when he woke up. Somehow, I didn't process that this meant he didn't have wings, so I asked some people in my class what kind of bug Gregor was. They told me they had imagined some kind of beetle. Since then, I've pictured Gregor as a cockroach. (For some reason, the beetle interpretation didn't settle with me. I just couldn't imagine it.) But then I saw the cover illustration.  I couldn't believe it. A drawing of Gregor's insect form, on the cover , of all places. I was enraged. In my opinion, this drawing is a...

On September 29th, I had a dream about cockroaches. In the dream, I walked into my room to discover my bed was covered in cockroaches of all sizes, from fly size to two feet long, who would suction themselves to bare skin like a kind of flying leech. The next Wednesday, October 10th, we had our first discussion on  The Metamorphosis . My dream about cockroaches couldn't have had better timing. The first day, we talked a lot about how  The Metamorphosis is dream-like, from the bizarre floor plan of Gregor's floor plan to the immediate appearance of the chief clerk when he doesn't show up to work. But one of the things I found strange about book I of  The Metamorphosis  was the reaction of Gregor's family, and especially his father, to his transformation. I couldn't understand why Gregor's father was so violent toward Gregor once he became an insect. Putting aside any past issues the two may have, if it's obvious to the family that this giant insect is Gre...