LABOR, EXPLOITATION AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF ECONOMIC IDENTITY: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF FRANZ KAFKA'S THE METAMORPHOSIS

Abstract

This paper critically analyzes the construction of economic identity in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka by exploring how labor and exploitation are made to define individual value and social relationships. The study is based on Marxist literary criticism and views labor as a structuring element that establishes identity, power, and marginalization in capitalist modernity. To accomplish this goal, the paper utilizes the three-dimensional approach of Critical Discourse Analysis developed by Norman Fairclough, which addresses textual, discursive, and social practices within specific passages of the novella.

This analysis shows that the language of Kafka always foreshadows exhaustion, discipline, and internalized obligation, and how labor dominates the process of self-definition even during crisis. Capitalist ideologies of responsibility, productivity, and efficiency are demonstrated to make exploitation and resistance natural through discursive means. In social practice, the paper demonstrates how economic inability leads to spatial marginalization, deprivation of agency, and progressive identity obliteration both in the workplace and family set-up. Through the combination of Critical Discourse Analysis and Marxist theory, this study aims to provide a materialist interpretation that emphasizes the ideological practices in the construction and deconstruction of economic identity. The research adds to Kafka scholarship by prefiguring the concept of labor as a structural agent instead of a backdrop context, supporting the demonstration of the persistence of The Metamorphosis in modern discourse on work, precarity, and human value in capitalism.