Becoming Non-Human: Narrative Sovereignty and the Production of Bare Life in Lu Xun’s The Diary of a Madman and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Abstract

— The relationship between literary form and political power has long been a central concern of comparative literary studies. Dehumanization, as a recurrent theme across modernist fiction, has been examined extensively at the level of content, yet its formal dimensions remain underexplored. This paper discusses the function of narrative structure itself in Lu Xun’s The Diary of a Madman (1918) and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1912) as a means of dehumanization. Based on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life” ( nuda vita ) and Gérard Genette’s narratological theory, this study claims that the uses of Agamben in literary works have been limited to the level of content, which analyzes the social exclusion of the characters, but overlooks the structural level: the frame narrative is itself a sovereign mechanism that produces the protagonist as homo sacer . In both texts, a narrative voice that is hierarchically higher has “narrative sovereignty”, the authority to name, enclose, and eventually destroy the subjectivity of the embedded narrator. But the two texts engage in opposing terminal operations: Lu Xun ’s frame brings about an “inclusive exclusion” with the cure and r eabsorption of the madman into the symbolic order, while Kafka’s narration is an “abandonment” that throws Gregor’s viewpoint out after his death. The comparative analysis is a narratological supplement to Agamben’s biopolitical theory, which shows that li terary form is not simply a medium for depicting bare life but is a place where bare life is produced.