The Metamorphosis

The author we might not have known about

It’s crazy how I haven’t read this book because this book was an excerpt for at least 3 SAT prep and 2 ACT prep questions for the Reading comprehension sections. I didn’t know who it was by, how a story about how a man turns into a bug was really that big deal, or how it ends.

I then had friends who performed at an open mic in London under the name “Kafkaesque” which I remember enjoying. I had heard the word get thrown around before not knowing what it meant, so I watched literary analysis videos on what the term meant while on a YouTube spiral down the Ted-Ed channel. As one does. Obviously.

So when picking books to read for this January, I decided on this one. And I had no idea what to expect.

Summary (with spoilers because this book is old y’all lol)

One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant beetle in his bed. As he tries to weigh his options of how to get to work and what his boss will think of his tardiness. His parents and sister, are concerned and knock on the door to have him get up. During this, his boss arrives at his house asking to see Gregor. He then finds that he can’t speak in his new body. When he is able to wrangle the door open with his stick like hands, his family and boss are horrified by his new appearance. The boss fires him on the spot to the shock and horror of his family.

While contemplating his family’s fate after getting sequestered to his bedroom, his sister is the only one that comes in to feed him with table scraps, as well as clean his room. He is thankful for this but as time goes on, even this too becomes too much of a chore for her. During this time each family member picks up work to support the family, as Gregor working as a salesman was their sole source of income. As they become full time workers, they have less and less patience for Gregor. He had even picked up more bug like traits like hiding underneath furniture and climbing on the walls and celling of the room. When his sister finds how he likes to climb, she decides to move furniture out of the way. His sister and mother try to take everything in his room out but he freaks out over them taking the picture of a woman hanging on the wall that he was fond of. This burst of action from Gregor causes his mother to pass out. His sister rushes out of the room and when he tries to follow her out, she is startled and breaks the glass bottle of medicine she had grabbed from the other room. While this is happening, he didn’t realize his father has come home, who is most enraged by his appearance. He sees Gregor in the living room and starts throwing apples at him, injuring him badly. He starts not eating or moving about.

After a time, the family housed boarders and made his room a storage room for all their other belongings. These boarders were very arrogant in their behavior and demanded everything be spotlessly clean. One night, his father had his sister play the violin for the boarders. Swayed by the music, Gregor inches closer and closer into the hall where he could hear better. He then is found out by the tenants who threaten to leave. Knowing that he is unwanted, Gregor starves to death and is found by the cleaning woman they had hired in the morning. They dispose of his body, relieved of the burden of him and look optimistically to the future.

Interpretations of Kafka

My first thought after finishing this book was “Damn, this book is depressing!” and “What a strange book”. So I went to see what kind of person the author was. I’ll link his wiki page here since I don’t really want to quote it verbatim. As much as this man loved writing, he had such crippling self-doubt that he only got “literary genius” status much later, after his death. His books are hotly debated in terms of what lens they should be read in.

Here are a few interesting ones that you might find interesting:

1. Franz Kafka’s upbringing on display

   This one I found to be quite interesting for a few reasons. I think it is quite a new trend to want to psychoanalyze artists through their work. He grew up with a very authoritarian father with many of his books that center around characters who are in oppressive and confusing systems where they don’t know the rules and are crushed by them. Some might read into this and say that because of his relationship with his father, the interpretation of Gregor might be that the father was not proud and actually hated his son, and when his son didn’t perform by supporting him financially and became a bug, he outright tried to hurt him and didn’t see him as his. Because the patriarch of the family made him feel alienated, perhaps he felt like an outcast in his own family. We might conclude that The Metamorphosis is a reflection of the author’s strained relationship with his father, and that he had issues seeing his life’s work of writing as a fluke since he never really pushed to publish his work while he was living. Kafka even asked his friend to burn his work upon his death.

2. Absurdist comedy

   This one piqued my interest it completely goes against my first gut reaction. He was known to read out sections he thought would be funny to his friends. This in general is kind of heartwarming, but of course in the same way we find stand up comedy or a dark humored meme funny, laughing at the absurdity of the situation seems to make sense after reading it again. Like if the book was written in this style it might sound like “Lol, he turned into a bug that’s so strange. Why is he so worried about getting to work? He’s a literal bug” or “Why is he trying to keep the painting of the woman so diligently, ya perv. Don’t you have more important things to worry about haha”. It’s a bit funny now. It makes you laugh and then sigh at overall hopelessness of it all. Maybe helps us forget our own unsolvable problems for a bit to fret over a fictional one.

3. Part of the existentialist cannon

   Hopelessness, loneliness, and the absurdity of existing in the modern world are classic existentialist themes covered in existentialist literature but also very much themes of The Metamorphosis too. As you can see in Figure 1, the Venn Diagram is just a circle, thus one in the same. It does definitely fall into the timeline of existentialists quite neatly, but Kafka has a brand of absurdity and illogical nature that is has it’s own name, Kafkaesque. Although completely absurd in its premise, you can see that he is very lonely watching his family slowly become hostile towards him, watching their interactions at a distance or hearing their discussions through the walls.

   

   Figure 1: Themes in Existentialist Literature Vs. Themes in The Metamorphosis

   The main character truly is distraught by the end of the story - injured, hungry, and unable to communicate in his form, which becomes his demise.

I think after looking into all of these, I am definitely torn between the three. But I do find these interpretations to be useful both with this story and possibly others in the future, as ways to think about art, including the books we read and movies we watch. Which one speaks to you the most?

See you next week!