Cockroach and Transformation Motifs in Kafka's Transformation and Lispector's The Passion according to G.H.

In this study, cockroach and transformation as two common motifs in two prose texts by two competent representatives of world literature, one (Kafka) a witness to the brutality of World War I, and the other (Lispector) to World War II, were analyzed comparatively. In Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, the male main character Gregor Samsa finds himself transformed into a gigantic cockroach one morning in his bed. The female main character in Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H ., on the other hand, eats a cockroach she encounters when she enters a servant's room in her house that she has not entered for a long time. In Kafka's text, the main character's transformation takes place with his body turning into a cockroach in its entirety, while in Lispector's text, this transformation occurs with the main character taking the cockroach, which symbolizes everything she has alienated and excluded from life, into her own body, that is, by eating it. The study aims to determine how and for what purpose these motifs, which establish a strong dialogic relationship between the two texts, are used by the authors and to reveal the common and different aspects between them. In the analysis carried out for this purpose, first, the general commonalities between the texts were mentioned, and then the dialogic relationship between the texts was examined in depth over the individual analysis of each text in terms of these similar or different elements. The cockroach and transformation motifs, which bring together both texts written in the warlike and chaotic world of the 20th century around a certain point, were deciphered with an eclectic and plural reading method that primarily makes use of critical protocols both inherent in and transcendent to the text, namely comparison and intertextual analysis.