The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

At first he wanted to get out of bed with the lower part of his body, but this lower part—which, by the way, he had not yet looked at and which he also could not picture clearly—proved itself too difficult to move. The attempt went so slowly. When, having become almost frantic, he finally hurled himself forward with all his force and without thinking, he chose his direction incorrectly, and he hit the lower bedpost hard. The violent pain he felt revealed to him that the lower part of his body was at the moment probably the most sensitive.

The story of Gregor Samsa is one of the most widely known in the world of literature. From the first sentence, we know we are in a world defined very differently than our own, yet the   settings confirms that this is indeed the world we live in. Gregor has awakened transformed into "an enormous vermin." His exoskeleton and many, waving, "pitifully thin" legs give a hint regarding what kind of vermin he is, a beetle, bug or other shelled critter.

While we expect a tone of horror to accompany one's own discovery of this transformation, what we get instead is a strong sense of humor. Gregor is trying to get out of bed, and in the process strikes the "lower part of his body" on the bedpost.  While great literature is often serious in tone, this cannot be read without a wry smile. It recalls many episodes of America's Funniest Home Videos, the fathers being struck in the "lower part of the body" by a plastic ball bat, a kicked ball, an errant dog's nose. 

In this case, the humor is not Gregor's sense of humor, at least not in the sense that he sees the humor in the situation of himself being transformed into an enormous vermin. Rather, the source of the humor is in Gregor's denial of the reality of his transformation. He remains determined to get out of bed, pack his things, and head off to work. To introduce this pattern of denial, and especially the humor of these denials, Kafka uses that greatest of all physical humor jokes: a shot at a man's "lower part of his body."  

Ouch.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. New York: Bantam Classics, 1916.

"A Foreign Body" from We're Flying by Peter Stamm

If he'd been very concentrated and managed to focus his attention on the group, then surely it would be possible to get by without slides, and finally even without words, and just be in the dark and allow time to elapse for an hour or two.

Stamm's collection of short stories includes "A Foreign Body," a story about cave explorer Christoph and, in a way, about how his changed relationship to the caves he loves and explores reflects his relationships with other people.

What makes the sentence above so effective is its placement before we learn of the presentation he is about to give. Once we learn that the slides are pictures taken within the least accessible caves, the caves where even the paying public extreme athletes aren't allowed to go, we can imagine that he means that he could express the nature of the caves, the sense of darkness, stillness, and quiet, just by sitting with his audience in the dark.

However, that is what the sentence means only after we read about the stalactites, the cave floor, and the still air. Its placement before that description allows another reading. Christoph is also expressing both his own isolation in society as well as his desire for shared experience. There is an implied pessimism about this experience, however, as it is one that would be defined by darkness, silence, and the sense of isolation even within a group.

By the end of the short story, Christoph's changed relationship to the caves that are his passion is revealed. Returning to this sentence upon completing the story reinforces this reading that focuses on human relationships rather than on the presentation of the cave itself. 

Stamm, Peter. "A Foreign Body." We're Flying. Trans., Michael Hoffman. New York: Other Pr, 2008.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

When all time ended, and the world had lost its memory, and the man that he was had receded from view like a ship sailing away, rounding the blade of the earth, with his old life locked in its hold; and when the gyring stars gazed down upon nothing, and the moon in its arc no longer remembered his name, and all that remained was the great sea of hunger on which he floated forever—still, inside him, in the deepest place, was this: one year. 

Yes. This is one sentence. One sentence to begin Chapter 15 of Cronin's post-apocalyptic novel. When I teach poetry, I tell my students that everything matters: every word, every capital letter, every mark of punctuation, every choice to use a dash instead of a comma, every choice to make a line long or short, every rhyme, every rhythm. All of these choices invest the poem with meaning. So it is with Cronin's introduction to Chapter 15. 

Our man of the moment, black-ops FBI agent Wolgast, has been confronted with a world-altering event, the specifics of you will learn when you read the first fourteen chapters. That event is not under consideration here, however, except as how it affects the narrative. The pace of the events leading up the moment is reflected in the pace of this one sentence. 

Wolgast experiences an existential confusion, a shattering of his Weltanschauung, a sense that his memories of the old world would now be of little help in the new one, a sense of abandonment, even by the moon and stars. The structure of the long sentence, which meanders, but not aimlessly, reinforces his frantic new search—"the great sea of hunger"—for his place in the world.

There is one more sentence in this opening paragraph to the chapter. The "one year" that will define his place, even as he hungers for something different: 

"The mountain and the turning of the seasons, and Amy. Amy and the Year of Zero."

Cronin, Justin. The Passage. New York: Ballantine, 2011.

The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel

Sophie's wedding dress hung in the bedroom closet. It was a white, enormous thing, voluminous under plastic, and he saw it every morning while he was getting dressed for work. He stared at it while he put on his tie. It hung still and heavy, a presence, a ghost.

Emily St. John Mandel's novel The Singer's Gun is not your ordinary mystery thriller.  Yes, the crime family is here, but it's a literal family. Petty criminal parents with their "adopted" child Aria,  who becomes a criminal mastermind, and the parents' own son Anton, who seeks an escape from crime, but finds this escape through a fraud of his own creation. Anton could have attended college but chose not to, yet desires the fruits of the labor of the college graduate. Anton's personal life reflects this tension between desire and dedication, between what he wants and what he is willing to sacrifice to achieve the goal.

Anton's engagement to Sophie, an accomplished cellist whose performance we only hear as she practices behind a closed door, survives a series of invitations and cancellations, until the wedding dress itself bears an atmosphere of oppression and gloom. The dress foreshadows what any reader might guess will happen should these two be married. The "white, enormous thing" hangs in the closet as a "ghost," shadowy, fragile, insubstantial remnant of what love may have once existed. It is, in other words, a future remembrance of the end.

Worse yet, the dress is "still" and kept "under plastic," images that together with the image of the ghost, recall death and even autopsy. This "voluminous" symbol of the couple's dead love, normally a reminder of the joy of union, instead recalls the body bag. Anton lives with the dead thing in his room but pretends that nothing has changed. Whether body bag, ghost, or dead thing itself, Anton simply stares and "put on his tie." 

St. John Mandel, Emily. The Singer's Gun. Cave Creek, AZ: Unbridled Books, 2010.

The City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

It was the eve of May at the Supper Room, and Tommie the Keep had the ceiling fans set to their highest rachet, and they whirred noirishly against the night, and were stoical, somehow, like the old uncles of the place, all raspy and emphysemic (230).

Barry's novel is written in a kind of future Irish brogue, it seems, and Barry is willing to invent language that invests his descriptions with precision of tone and of image.  To begin the fortieth chapter, Barry invokes a "noirish" whirring of the ceiling fans.  The ceiling fans in your living room may be nothing, but the description of them here sets the tone for the rest of the short chapter, and indeed for the final chapter of the book which follows.

"Noir" is not just about darkness or night.  Girly Hartnett, the 90-year-old matriarch of the organized crime family that runs the city of Bohane, is a movie buff, and requests films by actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood.  "Noirishly" invokes an image of Hollywood of the 40's: black & white, romantic, full of mystery and murder and hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade, love and violence together without irony or offense.  Girly's requests, however, are not specifically noir films, but do suggest gang or crime-related films. Girly requested movies by Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood, both of whom had been such films.  Wood, for example, starred in both Rebel Without a Cause and West Side Story.  The Wanderer, a film delivered by Girly's son for her, focused on Italian street gangs in 1963.

To say that the ceiling fans "whirred noirishly," then, is to suggest a complex interplay of theme, tone, and image, recalling the crime-dramas and attitude of the bygone days of Hollywood.  These fans are stoic, like the hardboiled detectives of these crime-dramas, yet also "raspy and emphysemic."  The days of old are, after all, distinctly old.  They are aged, antique at least, as old as Girly herself.  The matriarch of the family has left her mark, not just on the city at large, but even on each back alley bar, right down to the sound of the stoic yet sick-sounding ceiling fans.

Barry, Kevin. The City of Bohane. Minneapolis: Gray Wolf Press, 2012.

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart

I'm learning to worship my new äppärät's screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books know only the minds of their authors.

*äppärät: a device worn around the neck, like a smartphone on steroids.  It streams information about you to other äppärät users, and gathers information streams from retailers, news sources, and fellow users; includes information on how other people view your personality, attractiveness, and financial stability (based on your credit score).  

There's something about this novel that is both fantastical and true to life. If you haven't texted someone sitting right next to you, you've seen it happen. Maybe you laughed, and maybe you barely noticed. The industrial age is far behind; the information age is now, and the äppärät is the logical extension of information technologies, social media, and virtual experiences becoming the predominant mode of interacting with each other. 

The passage makes books sound so limited in scope: they can only demonstrate the point of view of the author. However, books also reveal the mind of the reader as the reader interprets the book through whatever lens makes sense at the time. 

The point, however, is that books themselves are dumb. The book cannot know more than the mind of its author, whereas the äppärät is constantly acquiring and disseminating new information. (The Texas Board of Education apparently wants that to be the limit of education, but I will continue to encourage critical thinking, I promise.) This omniscience of the äppärät is precisely why we understand why Lenny, the novel's ersatz hero, is "learning to worship" the teardrop of technology that hangs close to his heart.  As the novel reveals more and more the dystopia that America has become, the äppärät becomes the most solid feature of Lenny's life, second only, and only maybe second, to his love for his young love, Eunice.


Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2010.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky--seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.


The last sentence of Conrad's most widely-read work reinforces the central motif of the novel, namely the contrast between light and dark.  Throughout the early pages of the novel, light and dark appear alternately. There is the "luminous space" in the sky, but also a "brooding gloom." The river "shone pacifically" but a mist "like a gauzy and radiant fabric" begins to cover the shoreline.  Even the ships mentioned in the beginning reference this contrast of light and dark: mention of The Golden Hind, a treasure ship loaded with gleaming gold, is followed directly by reference to the Erebus, named after the Greek personification of darkness.


At the end of Conrad's novel, however, light is nowhere to be found, only "a black bank of clouds," a river that flows "sombre under an overcast sky" and that flows into "the heart of an immense darkness." For readers of the novel, this transition might seem obvious, but it reinforces the craft of Conrad, and of all authors who control the imagery of the novel to reflect the purpose and themes of the novel itself.

The Family Fang by Kevin Wilson

Annie took another sip of the vodka, letting the alcohol seep through her system, turning bad ideas into good ones.


There are times when the words of a novel are more like poetry than storytelling, when the sound of the language matters as much as the idea. This is one of those great moments in reading. Rearrange the words of the sentence into lines that look like poetry and it would work as a poem.  Enough is said and left unsaid to be artful, provoking, meaningful, and beautiful.


While Annie's influence here is vodka, one can easily consider the vodka a metaphor for all influences that have the effect of "turning bad ideas into good ones." Annie's experience can relate to everything from peer pressure to over-zealous ambition, or any other experience when we let outside influences put a veil over our more rational decision making mind, when we go with the flow that we know will probably lead us to some Class V rapids that we would normally avoid.


Wilson, Kevin. The Family Fang. New York: Ecco, 2012.

Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine

My sister said it was an adventure book and that the trouble with adventure books was "all action and no feeling."  She said that the book had the moral complexity of a baseball game and that her hand would force no nine-year-old girl to read it.

These two sentences end the first page of Sara Levine's first novel, Treasure Island!!! It is the story of a woman whose life has been anything but an adventure, but who finds adventure within the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and decides to live her life according to the principles she derives from his work. Read Levine's book to discover these principles for yourself.

The sister's description of the adventure book as having "the moral complexity of a baseball game" made it necessary for me to buy the book and read on to page two. The description is fun, engaging, meaningful, and frankly, funny enough to make me smile.

From a critical viewpoint, while Levine could have chosen just about anything devoid of moral complexity to complete this description--a doorbell, a novel's dustjacket, the nightstand upon which you bury books you don't intend to finish--the choice to reference the baseball game places the novel within a particularly American context. The hero of the novel, a college graduate who has moved from odd job to odd job, including ice-cream scooper and pet librarian (you'll see), has a bit of the bootstrapper in her, the rugged individualist, even a bit of the entrepreneur.  So the choice is smart as well as funny.

Levine, Sara. Treasure Island!!! New York: Europa Editions, 2012.

Why We Write

Literature provides examples of moral leadership and moral bankruptcy, descriptions of urban landscapes and idyllic countrysides, unique characters one gets to know as well as oneself and stock characters like the mad scientist.  Great literature provides all of these examples within a context of great writing, and that is what this blog is all about.  The words, phrases, and sentences that makes us stop and wish we had written that, that make us realize that it has not all been said before.  Great literature is great writing.  The examples in this blog will come from classic and contemporary literature, and from traditional canon as well as from less well-explored literature, such as great examples from science fiction and fantasy