The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka
Interpreting the Transformation of Gregor Samsa and his Family
The Metamorphosis opens with a jolt: "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin" (2747).
Surprisingly, Gregor’s bizarre new state is not the central transformation in the novel. Instead, Kafka uses Gregor’s surreal change as a catalyst for an almost more shocking metamorphosis: that of Gregor’s family, as they move from helplessness and sympathetic fear to emancipation and hostile rejection. In fact, it is Gregor who remains largely unchanged. He struggles to maintain his daily routine during most of the story, until his body finally forces him to surrender and accept that he is no longer fully human. Furthermore, even when confronted with proof of his family’s scorn and rejection, Gregor refuses to see them as anything but justified in their disappointment and anger towards him.
It’s a telling detail that neither Gregor nor his family wonder why or how he’s turned into an insect. Upon discovering his state, Gregor’s mother sobs and later faints, while his father reacts with great anger. However, they make no attempt to change him back. Gregor does want to find a “cure”, but must give up almost from the start, when he loses his ability to speak.
Once he’s unable to communicate, Gregor becomes a mere observer of the world around him. At the same time, this isolation evokes a series of startling revelations and actions from his parents and sister, triggered by their assumption that he can no longer understand what they say and their belief that he has lost all human traits.
Thus, the reader learns that Gregor has been supporting his family for years; that their apartment, their everyday sustenance, and their few luxuries (Grete’s fancy dresses and violin lessons) come from Gregor’s hard work. This explain’s Gregor’s distress at the prospect that he must “stay in bed being useless” (2752). However, a family meeting that Gregor overhears reveals that his parents have been hoarding money, and that they had decided to keep living off their son’s earnings for as long as they could.
Rather than being angry, Gregor is actually relieved that his family has “saved” money. He feels he has to show “every possible consideration,” and “help them bear the inconvenience which he simply had to cause them in his present condition” (2761). His parents, Gregor thinks, “were suffering enough as it was” (2763). All along, he believes he will be able to work again, that this is a temporary illness, and that life will eventually return to normal.
Gregor’s love and devotion towards his family remain unchanged throughout the story, the only constant left in his rapidly deteriorating life. As his physical needs and abilities shift from human to animal, it is his family who forces him to adapt to his new identity: they remove the furniture from his room, begin feeding him leftovers, and gradually help strip away everything that had identified him as a human being. It is no surprise, then, that they’re able to exclude Gregor from their lives, and ultimately cause his death. By the end of the story, Gregor’s parents and sister have themselves metamorphosed: they regain a youthful vigor as they begin to work, take trips to the countryside, and eventually sell the apartment they had shared with Gregor.
Therefore, whose is the real metamorphosis? Gregor’s change is superficial, since he resists adapting to his new physical identity. Kafka’s choice to portray Gregor as a “vermin” (in some editions, this is translated as “cockroach”) implies a useless and parasitic nature that clashes with his personality. On the other hand, Gregor’s “disappearance” forces his parents and sister out of their own parasitic existence, leading them to a much deeper transformation at the end. Even the dying Gregor recognizes this, as he realizes that “[h]is conviction that he had to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s” (2781)
Bibliography
The edition used for this article was: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis. In Mack, Maynard, et al (eds.). The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. New York: Norton, 1997. Pages 2756-2784. However, this work is in the public domain, and free electronic editions are available from Project Gutenberg.
