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Genres/Themes: Classic Literature, Fantasy
My Rating: ★★★★★
This was a required read for one of my college English courses. At first I didn't much care for it, but the more we discussed the story, the more it grew on me.
There is a lot of symbolism written into it. My favorite is the apple which causes the wound to fester like Eve's apple which caused Adam and Eve to be tossed out of the Garden of Eden resulting in pain and labor instead of peaceful days. I love all the connections this story makes to Faust.
In the end, I ended up liking the story so much that I submitted a paper to a literary contest comparing and contrasting filial piety in modern Western culture (using Metamorphosis and the Bible) to pre-modern Eastern culture (using Hong Gil Dong and the Analects of Confucius).
I highly recommend finding a discussion group or detailed discussion guide when reading this. There are a lot of deep and hidden meanings in this story that are sometimes hard to find or impossible to understand if you haven't read the associated literature.
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