How do non-human metaphors in Dostoevksy and Kafka express psychological identification, and how does this inform my own figurative practice through The Crab ?
Introduction
I don’t think creatives are meant to stay in one place, or at least, I find it very difficult to do so. There is so much crossover between artistic disciplines: literature, art, design, architecture, music. I used to think I had to choose only one and put on metaphorical blinders, believing that as a painter my inspirations should come only from painting. Lately, I’ve been learning to embrace the holistic nature of what informs my practice.
Fig. 1: Psalm 2: Death Waiting, Loretta Yussuff, 2025, oil on canvas, 120 × 60cm
For the Research Festival, I explored the major influence of literature and how my love of writers like Dostoevsky and Kafka can inform my visual work as a figurative painter. I created a psychological short story, The Crab, which mirrors the existential and psychological intensity I admire in their writing, and reflects the same fascination with the complexity of individual experience that drives my figurative painting.
The Crab (see link beneath Fig.2) is a monologue of a woman who imagines herself as or becomes a crab, blurring the lines between metaphor and metamorphosis. Her shell is both a form of self-protection and the prison that isolates her. Though in my figurative work I focus on colour and rhythm within the figure predominantly with oil paints on canvas to create a psychological and emotional landscape (see Fig.1). If we look to literature, there are many ways to create a psychological and emotional environments, the one that captivates my creative imagination the most is the use of metaphors, in particular non-human metaphors. By ‘non-human’ I am referring to comparisons between a character and either an animal, insect or an inanimate object and how the shared connotations of these non-human things reveal deeper and more viscerally the characters’ psychology.
Fig.2. The Crab book cover, Loretta Yussuff, 2025
Please click here to scroll through the full short story
Dostoevsky: From the Insect, to the Snake, to the Wall
I am exchanging the ‘figure’ in my paintings into the ‘character’ in the novel. I want to focus on the ways that the ‘figure’ in literature’s inner world is revealed not through colour and form like in paint but through precise non-human metaphors and embodiments that reveal more directly the inner workings of that figure’s state of being. I will be exploring how Dostoevsky and Kafka expertly use non-human metaphors, similes and embodiments to create a psychological identification between the character and the non-human description. First stop, the psychological, spiritual and conflict ridden world of the 19th century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.
In his 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky brings to life the Karamazov family, where the four men in the family act as embodiments of different philosophical positions and dramatically conflicting iterations of the human condition. Through them, conflicts such as faith versus doubt and reason versus passion are played out in vivid psychological form. Dmitri, the passionately debauched and spiritually destructive brother, confesses to his angelic brother Alyosha: ‘I loved depravity, I loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty: after all, I’m a bedbug, am I not, an evil insect? In a word, a Karamazov!’ (Dostoevsky, 2003, p.146). Dmitri insists that despite their differences, him living a life of debauchery and Alyosha living a monastic life, every Karamazov shares the same essence; even Alyosha ‘the angel’ carries ‘the crawling insect’ within him (Dostoevsky, 2003, p.144).
Through this metaphor, Dostoevsky transforms the family name Karamazov into something more than a lineage. It becomes a kind of non-human haunting, an ‘evil insect’ whose consequences cannot be escaped. Dmitri’s further self-comparison to a ‘bedbug’ a tiny creature that hides during the day and emerges at night to feed, mirrors his own psychological state and debaucherous lifestyle. He wears his degradation as a perverse badge of honour, taking pride in the very shame that consumes him. This paradox reappears not long later, when describing his lavish wasting of his inheritance to appease a prostitute he obsessed over, he recalls ‘three days later I was skint as a bald-headed falcon, but at least I was a falcon!’ (Dostoevsky, 2003, p.159). The contrast between the minuscule crawling bedbug and the grand soaring falcon captures Dmitri’s internal duality, pride and self-disgust, baseness and grandeur, revealing the torment of a man that comes across more viscerally through Dostoevsky’s deployment of these non-human comparisons to his glitching psychological world.
Fig. 3: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Penguin Classics Edition, book cover design by Coralie Bickford-Smith, 2004. Image source: Amazon
From characterising a family line and contradictory personality in The Brothers Karamazov, we move on to see an example of how in the novel The Devils the non-human is used to characterise the moral degradation of the central character Stavrogin. The Devils is a political satire exploring the consequences of being possessed by a political ideology. As the moral and psychological centre of the novel, Stavrogin represents the Godless person, a product of radical individualism and intellectual pride. After returning to his town after a long absence with rumours of scandals, he replies to remarks made on the psychological change others note in him, a cold mysterious change, he tells them, ‘I’ve grown a new skin like a snake’ (Dostoevsky, 2017, p.279). Rather than noting his change in a non-metaphorical way, this identification with the snake at once distances him from the human and aligns him with something instinctive, cold-blooded, and morally alien. The shedding of skin, often associated with renewal, becomes in Stavrogin’s case an image of hollow transformation, change without redemption. Through the non-human, Dostoevsky exposes a kind of self-knowledge in Stavrogin that is both proud and damning: he recognises his own corruption, yet he embraces it with the same serene detachment that makes him terrifying to others in the novel.
Distinct from insect and animal metaphors, Dostoevsky also uses inanimate objects as psychological descriptors to show to the reader the chasm between how a character sees themselves vs how we know him to be. In his 1869 novel The Idiot, Ivolgin, a man of many fabricating stories begins to defend himself by breaking into one of his many self-aggrandising speeches, here he uses a metaphor to try to get others to trust him while unintentionally ironically revealing to them and to the reader how unreliable he truly is. He declares to them ‘Whoever says “Ivolgin” says “a wall” ; you can rely on Ivolgin like a wall.’ (Dostoevsky, 2004, p.152), the use of the non-human here is used to express falsely psychological identification which has the effect of revealing Ivolgin’s psychological flaws to those around him and the reader rather than himself, it makes us see clearer how unlike a ‘wall’ he is, how un-sturdy and unreliable as a person he is. Here, Dostoevsky allows the metaphor to ‘fail’ creating an obvious mismatch between the person and the descriptor to reveal deeper the false self perception that us as the reader will easily be able to see through and find comedic.
From the ‘evil insect’ representing the Karamazov lineage, the snake representing coldness and moral degeneration to an unreliable characters’ proclamations of being a wall, these are just snippets of the ways Dostoevsky constantly enjoys using the non-human to psychologically map his characters and portray nuanced personality traits. Embracing the non-human ironically reveals the human more deeply, as hidden character traits come through more directly to the reader. Moving on, one cannot talk about the non-human without discussing the work of Kafka, none more heightened than through the work The Metamorphosis but also throughout his works like The Trial, the non-human maps not only a psychological condition but also a nightmarish reality beyond the individual.
Kafka: Like a Dog, Becoming an Insect
In the 20th century world of literature we land in the oppressive, absurd and painful world of Franz Kafka. Full of bureaucratic nightmares and helpless central characters, Kafka uses the non-human to convey more viscerally to the reader the helpless subordination of his characters in the face of oppressive powers.
Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial, takes us to a world where an ordinary bank clerk, Josef K.,is one day woken up and placed under arrest, no one in the bureaucratic establishment tells him why and no one seems to know why. The novel documents his existential struggle in this absurd system looking for answers as his normal life falls apart. At the end of the story he is deemed guilty, of what we don’t know, by whom we don’t know. The last paragraph describes the scene where two officers drag him out in the middle of the night to a quarry on the city’s outskirts to execute the guilty man, one officer drives a knife into his heart while the other holds his throat.
‘As his sight failed, K. could still see them in front of his face, leaning together cheek by cheek as they watched the final moment. ‘Like a dog!’ he said; it was as if the shame was to outlive him.’ (Kafka, 2010, p.172)
Here Kafka viscerally captures the root of the emotional condition in K’s treatment, as well as the treatment of people within this bureaucratic system through K.’s final words self identifying his fate with that of a dog rather than a human being. Usually a simile has two parts, the thing being described and its comparison, but here Kafka leaves the simile to stand as a declaration rather than a general comparison, ‘Like a dog!’. This not only reflects K.’s emotional state and the shame he feels as he endures a dehumanising process at the mercy of the state, it also reveals the shame of his own complicity in his subordination to that same system. The connotations of the dog are that of loyalty, submission and innocent naivety mirroring K.’s own relationship to the bureaucratic machine that has now, without explanation, put him down ‘like a dog’. The animal innocence embedded in the line evokes a deep sympathy for K., as Kafka uses this non-human signifier to express both the tragedy and absurdity of his condition.
Fig 4: The Trial (dir. Orson Welles, 1962), film still featuring Anthony Perkins as Josef K. standing before the monumental doors of the court offices. Image source: Film Grab
Moving from a declaration of the non-human to a physical transformation to it, can be found brilliantly in Kafka’s famous 1915 novella The Metamorphosis. Here, Gregor Samsa is an overworked, anxious, and isolated travelling salesman living entirely at the mercy of his boss. He describes himself as ‘the boss’s creature, spineless and stupid’ (Kafka, 2010, p.461). His parents are in debt to this boss, whom Gregor despises yet must continue to serve. Having already worked five years without a single day off sick, he predicts he will remain trapped in this condition for ‘another five or six years’ (Kafka, 2010, p.460) until the debt is repaid.
One morning, after a bad dream, Gregor wakes up to find himself transformed into ‘a huge verminous insect’ (Kafka, 2010, p.459) (see fig.5). His body has undergone the transformation that mirrors his psychological and spiritual state, halfway through his projected ten years of servitude, his subconscious enacts a kind of rebellion; he can no longer hide his mental condition as it takes over the physical. Gregor has moved from merely feeling like his boss’s ‘creature’ to becoming one. The fact that this metamorphosis follows a bad dream suggests it emerges from the depths of his repressed psyche, his internal identification with the non-human is made literal.
Even in this grotesque new form, Gregor’s first thoughts are not of himself but of his obligations, on how to catch the next train to work, and how to calm his worried parents. There is no space for self-empathy in his world; instead he chastises himself: ‘You can’t just stay in bed doing nothing’ Gregor thought to himself (Kafka, 2010, p.463). In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s psychological condition becomes a visceral reality, the metaphor made physical reality, revealing with painful clarity the anxiety, subordination, and imprisonment that define his existence within both his work and his family life. The non-human takes over the human in an act of rebellion to show how he is being treated.
Blending the non-human with the human, Kafka shows how interior consciousness persists even when the body is transformed. Gregor Samsa becomes a grotesque insect, yet his thoughts, responsibilities, and emotions remain fully human. The non-human form externalises his psychological and existential condition, making literal the anxiety, subordination, and alienation he has long felt. Even when others perceive him as something inhuman, Kafka allows glimpses of his enduring humanity. As he wonders to himself after eavesdropping on his sister playing the violin, ‘Was he a beast, when he was moved by music?’ (Kafka, 2010, p.502), we see that connection to feeling and aesthetic experience persists despite his alien body. This moment emphasises the tension between external perception and internal identity, showing that the human interior can survive and assert itself even in absurd and dehumanising circumstances. Such examples of non-human metaphor and embodiment foreground the psychological interior, and this line of thinking naturally leads into my own exploration of identity and metaphor in The Crab.
The Crab: Between Metaphor and Metamorphosis
In my short story for the research festival The Crab (please see link under Fig.2), non-human identifiers are used to map the psychological landscape of a woman who is disconnected, proud, and ultimately deeply lonely in her repressed longing for safe connection. Even the title of the work being The Crab reflects the emphasis here on exploring how a non-human symbol can reflect all of the psychological drama happening in an individual, in order to relay the feeling of it more directly and viscerally to the reader.
In the first section, the nameless narrator refers to her previous psychological identification with a stone and names other non-human things she sees herself as, effectively updating her psychological identifiers in real time until she lands on and becomes the crab. Leaving behind the past stone identifier, she tries new metaphors of inanimate objects such as a tower, a sheet of gold, and a metal until she finds the animal metaphor that fits her (Yussuff, 2025, p,1-2). She declares: ‘Still clawing through life so slowly it seems, really I’m a crab of a woman. Yes, a sharp, crawling, helpless crab’ (Yussuff, 2025, p.2).
This metaphoric style can be related to Dostoevsky’s Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, who describes himself through non-human imagery as a crawling bedbug or a falcon to reveal more intimately the contradictions of his nature. In my story, the narrator performs this act of self-revelation directly to the reader. There is no one else in this story but her and the reader whom she struggles with in her pursuit of vulnerability. Immediately after this identification of the crab, she begins to describe herself as having pincers, parading her transformation before us, ‘Look at the form of me…I have everything’ (Yussuff, 2025, p.3). This shows a new physical embodying the crab, her shift mirrors that of Gregor Samsa waking from a bad dream and finding himself an insect as the crab becomes the new and fitting physical expression of her psychic condition.
In the final sentence of the story, where she dances for the reader in a desperate plea for freedom and to be seen, the human and non-human descriptors blur, echoing the blurring in The Metamorphosis where Gregor questions how true of a beast he is when he is moved by hearing his sister play the violin. The narrator orders the reader to keep their gaze on her while she dances to witness her, ‘As my feet stumble, yes! Even! As the sand gets in my eye, yes! Even! As the blood rushes to my ears, to my curls, my chest heaves, my legs crack, oh wow!’ (Yussuff, 2025, p.8). In this ecstatic and absurd moment of attempted movement, having previously regarded herself as stiff symbols from the stone to now becoming the crab, the psychological identification loosens. The sand in her eye recalls the crab’s natural environment, while the mention of her ears, curls, and chest draws the human back into view. When she says ‘my legs crack’, it recalls both the fragile cracking of crab legs in the human process of eating them and the violence of self-consumption. This could suggest a self-inflicted pain or a psychological struggle between her human and crab selves, where the human takes back power by consuming the non-human form that once protected her.
We are left in uncertainty. Is the crab dying due to the destruction caused in the dance or in ecstasy at feeling seen and free? Is the human self’s identification with her crab-self dying as she finally reaches toward connection, even if it is with us, her distant ‘dear reader’ (Yussuff, 2025, p.6) or is she shedding her non-human identifiers to return to her real self, her own legs, her own curls, her own chest?
We are left with ‘Oh wow!’, these could represent her last words or a new beginning. Whether she is describing herself as a crab in the Dostoevskian sense of self-identification as a falcon or a wall, or has truly become the metaphor as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the story hovers in the blur between the two.
Fig. 5: The Metamorphosis illustration, attributed to Robert Hasanov (date unknown), print/etching. Image source: The Spartan online article “The Horror of The Metamorphosis”.
Conclusion
Just like a Rorschach test, where viewing ambiguous ink blots and interpreting them reveals aspects of our psychological and emotional landscape depending on what we see, a butterfly or a cockroach? a bat or a crown? These non-human literary images I have explored operate on a direct and subconscious level.
Dostoevsky and Kafka both have the ability to locate and articulate these shadows within their characters, using metaphor, simile, and transformation with the non-human to expose their psychological depths and flaws. This has influenced my own experimentation with literature through The Crab, building psychological identifications with the non-human in order to impress upon the reader a visceral sense of how it feels in the psychological world of another. In this work, I follow in the vein of Dostoevsky and Kafka by employing metaphors and transformation to communicate the internal landscape of a character’s mind in connection with a sort of absurd existential confession.
This marks a significant step in a more holistic translating of my interest in creating emotional and psychological landscapes through oil painting. As a painter I use rhythm, colour, figuration, and material experimentation to impress the viewer with both individual and communal experiences. With this experiment in writing complete, this now inspires me to explore with the incorporation of the non-human within my paintings alongside figuration. These psychological identifiers could be introduced to complement the figures’ characterisation, either through symbols embedded within the painted landscape or through titles that establish a literary connection by naming the work after a non-human form. It is a nice way for me to honour my holistic influences and to see more directly how literature, particularly Dostoevsky and Kafka, can have a solid input into my figurative painting practice.
Fig. 6: The Crab (physical copies), photograph by Loretta Yussuff, 2025.
About the author
Loretta Yussuff is a London-based figurative painter whose work explores the psychological and emotional dimensions of contemporary life through Black British experience. She is currently completing an MA Fine Art: Painting at Camberwell College of Arts, graduating in 2025. The Crab represents her first exploration of writing as an extension of her visual practice.
Website: www.lorettayussuff.co.uk
Instagram: @LorettaYussuff
List of Figures:
1. Psalm 2: Death Waiting, Loretta Yussuff, 2025, oil on canvas, 120 × 60cm
2. The Crab book cover, Loretta Yussuff, 2025, digital artwork
3: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Penguin Classics Edition, book cover design by Coralie Bickford-Smith, 2004. Image source: Amazon
4. The Trial (dir. Orson Welles, 1962), film still featuring Anthony Perkins as Josef K standing before the monumental doors of the court offices. Image source: FIlm Grab
5. The Metamorphosis illustration, attributed to Robert Hasanov (date unknown), print/etching. Image source: The Spartan online article “The Horror of The Metamorphosis”
6. The Crab (physical copies), photographed by Loretta Yussuff, 2025
References:
Dostoevsky, F. (2003) The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by D. McDuff. London: Penguin Classics.
Dostoevsky, F. (2017) The Devils. Translated by M. R. Katz. London: Penguin Classics.
Dostoevsky, F. (2004) The Idiot. Translated by D. McDuff. London: Penguin Classics.
Kafka, F. (2010) The Essential Kafka. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics.
Yussuff, L. (2025) The Crab. London: Lulu Press.