Negative emotions in Kafka's Die Verwandlung and during reading the work

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the role of negative emotions in Franz Kafka's novella Die Verwandlung using the tools of cognitive narratology. I mainly focus on the emotions given to the protagonist. By identifying the perceived emotions and the triggered emotions, I show that the text supports the elicitation of an approximating emotional arc in the reader towards Gregor, opposite to the distancing emotional path followed by the fictional characters. Furthermore, through the interpretation of the text, I argue that Kafka's Die Verwandlung fundamentally depicts emotions and aims to evoke emotions. While the work is enigmatic and semantically diverging at the level of cognitive understanding, it points in one direction at the level of emotional understanding and provides a universally comprehensible and accessible experience of coherent understanding.