Both Dostoevsky and Kafka use their voices as authors to draw attention to the degradation of society they've noticed in the modern era. With the rise of industrialization and urbanization, the economy has boomed all over the world. At face value, it seems that human life is improving. There is better medicine, new inventions such as the steam engine, and cities are expanding. However, underneath the surface, society itself is coming apart at the seams because of a lack of the basic thing all humans need: emotional connections to others.
Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground highlights the effects of a bureaucratic society. The Underground Man has a minor job with some faceless company and lives the bare minimum of a life. While he has a stable (albeit meager) income, a home to call his own, and even a servant, he has no social life and fails at all attempts to make friends. Without emotional connections to others, his life has no meaning. Likewise, Gregor in The Metamorphosis is very responsible and provides for his entire family by working for a traveling sales company. However, the job takes up almost all of his time, and Gregor has no social life either (like the Underground Man). Furthermore, when Gregor misses work for the first time in five years, his employers immediately assume he is stealing or just faking an illness. They don't view him as a person; he is a source of profit and nothing else. Both Dostoevsky's and Kafka's main characters reveal that the impersonal bureaucracies of the modern world don't fulfill all aspects of the human experience. Humans don't just need money; they also need empathy.
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2 comments:
So true!
I am supporter of human advancement, obviously, but sometimes it can blind us. I think that during periods of rapid progress, society needs to remember the reason for which they are advancing. We strive to improve medical care to better the lives of people. We create technological wonders in order to help people and increase the efficacy of things. Ultimately, developing new technologies and modernizing is far more beneficial if we remember that we should be helping people. That’s an idealistic view—I know. Pharmaceutical companies improve medicine to make profits and so do businesses. That’s just the nature of our economy; this way of functioning sparks progress and competition, which ends up resulting in great achievements, so I completely support it! I just think that during times of major modernization, we need to make a special effort to stay in touch with our humanity. Because large profit margins and increased power in the business world won’t completely satisfy even the CEOs of companies, even if they make millions.
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