Abstract

ABSTRACT A nation might pride itself on being a free country, but many individuals are unaware of the significance that their freedom holds. A philosophy thought which concerns itself on the importance of human’s freedom is existentialism. This thesis is designed to prove that Franz Kafka is an existentialist writer and to find the uniqueness of his existentialism embedded in the writer’s great work “The Metamorphosis”. By using moral-philosophical approach, this inquiry incorporates information from literary and philosophy theories focusing on the general ideas of existentialism philosophy. Such incorporation of material provides a context for understanding the correlation between literature and philosophy, the existentialism ideas which can be generally found in literary works, and the different type of existentialism that of atheistic and theistic. The general ideas of existentialism which consist of four elements: moral individuation, choice and commitment, dread and anxiety, and alienation, have their own characteristics which later are called ideal type of existentialism philosophy. To prove that Franz Kafka is an existentialist literary writer, the inquirer is to apply the ideal type to the studied object so it will show whether or not Franz Kafka has set the existentialism thought in his writing. Since the studied object is a literary work and the research model used is to find some characteristics and uniqueness of the work from the applied theory, and the finding analysis is to be explained by providing the proofs found in the studied object using verbal description, this inquiry is termed as descriptive qualitative research. Through the characters and their characterizations in the studied object, it is finally found that Franz Kafka has put his ideas about the importance of human’s subjectivity and freedom in living a life. That symptom clearly includes Kafka as one of the existentialist literary writers. His idea about God who is easily spoken but never exists also explains that existentialism Kafka brings in The Metamorphosis is an atheistic one. Since existentialism is the most unique thought among other philosophies, logically there should be something that differentiates Kafka’s existentialism from other existentialists’. Through a deep analysis it is discovered that Franz Kafka has two notions which cannot be found in other existentialist’s form of their existentialism. This is the idea of being enslaved by others or a community which is not realized by the targeted object and it is about the idea of death as the answer to all human’s difficulties. Finally, this research will never come to end because science grows rapidly every single day which promises other researchers to hit upon new findings.

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