antagonist

One day a colleague, Marcello Marchesi, came from Milan with a book, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka … The unconscious, which Dostoevsky had used to probe and analyze emotions, became, in this book, material for the plot itself … Here was the individual unconscious, a shadow zone, a private cellar suddenly clarified …

Kafka moved me profoundly. I was struck by the way he confronted the mystery of things, their unknown quality, the sense of being in a labyrinth, and daily life turned magical.

-Federico Fellini

From: Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives by Burke/Waller