“I Am in Here”: A Comparative Reading of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

A. den Dulk
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), with Gregor Samsa’s transformation “into a gigantic insect”, forms an insightful comparative reading to the opening of Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), including Hal Incandenza’s seeming, unexplained catatonia. Wallace described Kafka’s fiction as conducting a “radical literalization of truths we tend to treat as metaphorical”. In comparing Kafka’s novella and Infinite Jest, the question ‘what has happened to Hal?’ thus means: what metaphor is literalized by Hal’s situation? In both texts, the metaphors represent selfhood and writing fiction; but, contrary to Gregor, Hal has taken up the task of self-becoming and symbolizes literary disclosure and communication – rendering Infinite Jest as a redemptive novel.
“我在这里”:大卫·福斯特·华莱士《无尽的玩笑》与弗朗茨·卡夫卡《变形记》的比较解读
卡夫卡的《变形记》(1915)中,格里高尔·萨姆萨“变成了一只巨大的昆虫”,与华莱士的《无尽的玩笑》(1996)的开头形成了深刻的对比阅读,其中包括哈尔·因肯扎看似无法解释的紧张症。华莱士将卡夫卡的小说描述为“将我们往往视为隐喻的真理激进地字面化”。在比较卡夫卡的中篇小说和《无尽的玩笑》时,“哈尔出了什么事?”’的意思是:哈尔的处境是什么样的隐喻?在这两篇文章中,隐喻都代表了自我和创作小说;但是,与格里高尔相反,哈尔承担了自我成为的任务,象征着文学的揭露和交流——把《无尽的玩笑》渲染成一部救赎小说。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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