What Lurks Behind the Shell? Kafkaesque Surrealism Revisited by Jackie Kay

This essay seeks to analyse Jackie Kay’s short story “Shell” (2002) with reference to a metamorphic tradition, in particular the modernist novella The Metamorphosis (1915) by Franz Kafka. Since both texts tackle the subject of the bodily transformation of a solitary character, albeit in two distinctly different manners, the paper will juxtapose them in order to investigate the writer’s reassessment of the monstrous body and the conflict it reveals about the social exclusion of otherness. It will also discuss Kay’s ingenious treatment of metamorphosis as a powerful source of self-invention.