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The Metamorphosis
Introduction
The first sentence of “The Metamorphosis” has become one of the most famous in modern fiction: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Franz Kafka thus subverts narrative tradition by stating his climax in his initial declarative sentence. He then organizes three subclimaxes in three frustrated attempts by Gregor to escape from the imprisonment of his bedroom. The novella's three sections divide it into three clearly identifiable parts, showing Gregor in relation to his occupation, his family, and his divided psyche. (Gray, 17)
In the first section, Gregor accepts his fantastic transformation matter-of-factly, perhaps wishing to bury its causes in his subconscious mind. Instead of worrying about the mystery of his metamorphosis, he worries about the nature and security of his position as traveling salesperson for a firm whose severity he detests. Even though his boss treats him tyrannically and overworks him, Gregor needs to keep his degrading job because his father owes his employer a huge debt. He can only dream of walking out into freedom in five or six years, after having slowly repaid it from his earnings. (Hayman, 58)
The firm's chief clerk appears in the Samsas’ apartment at 7:10 a.m. and inquires why Gregor failed to catch the 5:00 a.m. train to work. He yells at Gregor that he is “making a disgraceful exhibition” of himself, exploiting his anxiety and insecurity by telling him that his sales have slackened to the point where he faces dismissal. Gregor responds with an agitated speech replete with a succession of special pleas that contradict one another: He is only mildly indisposed, yet cannot rise from his bed; he feels all right, yet is struck down with a sudden malady. “Oh, sir, do spare my parents!” he cries hysterically—but the chief clerk cannot understand him: Gregor has lost his capacity for human speech. Frantic, Gregor manages to open his bedroom door by painfully turning its lock key with his toothless mouth. When he scuttles into the clerk's sight, however, ostensibly to reassure him about his health and competence, he instead puts him into panicked flight, with the clerk relinquishing his cane as he leaps down the stairs. This will prove Gregor's sole triumph over authority; it is short-lived. His father snatches up the cane and “pitilessly” drives his son back into his bedroom, with Gregor bleeding heavily from the agony of squeezing his broad, clumsy body through its half-door. (Karl, 69)
In the second section, Gregor's isolation and alienation intensify. The reader learns about his relations, past and present, with his family; they have been characterized by concealment, mistrust, and exploitation on the father's part. Gregor now discovers that, contrary to what he was led to believe, his father did not go bankrupt when his business failed but managed to save and augment a tidy sum while relying on Gregor's income to sustain the Samsas. Ever the dutiful son, Gregor “rejoiced at this evidence of unexpected thrift and foresight.” Gregor's mother is gentle, selfless, weak, and shallow; in the story's development she becomes increasingly her husband's appendage. His sister Grete is his favorite; he once hoped to subsidize her violin training in a conservatory. However, though she now ministers to his animal needs, she fails him emotionally, suggesting that his furniture be removed from his room—thereby stripping him of the last vestiges of his humanity. Desperately, Gregor scurries about the room trying to protect his possessions; his mother faints; his sister shakes her fist at him; then his father, now vigorously self-confident, joins battle with his son again and bombards him with apples, one of which grievously wounds his back. As Gregor is about to faint with pain, he sees his mother, her clothes in disarray, embracing his father “as she begged for her son's life.” (Eggenschwiler, 289)
In the third section, Gregor, defeated, yields up all hope of returning to the human community. His parents and sister form a triadic unit that shuts him out, as Gregor's miserable existence now slopes resignedly toward death. The wound in his back festers agonizingly; his room becomes a repository for the household's discarded articles and rejected food; he eats almost nothing. He does erupt from his room for what turns out to be the last time when he hears his sister performs a violin recital for roomers the Samsas have taken in; horrified by his appearance, they give immediate notice and threaten the family with a lawsuit for damages. Grete thereupon presides over a family conference in which she brusquely announces her determination to get rid of Gregor: “If this were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human beings can’t live with such a creature.” Gregor agrees with her, and that night dies a sacrificial death, reconciled with his family as he thinks of them “with tenderness and love.” The next morning the relieved Samsas make a holiday of his death day, review their promising prospects, and admire Grete's blooming young womanhood, bursting with crude health as she stretches her body in the spring sunshine. (Bouson, 81)
Symbols Contribute to the Themes and Meanings
Kafka's art is so profoundly ambiguous and multivalent that no single analysis can completely comprehend it. This evaluation will stress a psychoanalytic, expressionistic interpretation.
Gregor's metamorphosis accomplishes several of his aims: First, it frees him from his hated job with an odious employer by disabling him from working; second, it relieves him of the requirement to make an agonizing choice between his filial duty to his parents—particularly his father—and his desperate yearning to emancipate himself from such obligations and dependence. It thus enables him to “bug out” of his loathsome constraints yet do so on a level of conscious innocence, with Gregor merely a victim of an uncontrollable calamity. Moreover, Gregor's fantasies include aggressive and retaliatory action against the oppressive firm. He accomplishes this by terrorizing the pitiless, arrogant office manager, who tells him, “I am speaking here in the name of your parents and of your chief.” On the conscious level, Gregor pursues the clerk to appease him and secure his advocacy for Gregor's cause at the office; subconsciously, his threatening appearance and apparently hostile gestures humiliate his hated superiors.
Gregor's change also expresses his sense of guilt at having betrayed his work and his parents, at having broken the familial circle. It is a treacherous appeasement of this guilt complex, inviting his isolation, punishment, and death. His loss of human speech prevents him from communicating his humanity. His enormous size, though an insect (he is at least two feet wide), his ugly features, and his malodorous stench invite fear and revulsion. Yet his pacific temperament and lack of claws, teeth, or wings make him far more vulnerable than when his body was human. His metamorphosis therefore gives him the worst of both worlds: He is offensive in appearance but defenseless in fact, exposed to the merciless attack of anyone—such as his furious father—ready to exploit his vulnerability.
“The Metamorphosis,” then, can be seen as a punishment fantasy with Gregor Samsa feeling triply guilty of having displaced his father as leading breadwinner for the family, for his hatred of his job, and resentment of his family's expectations of him. He turns himself into a detestable insect, thereby both rebelling against the authority of his firm and father and punishing himself for this rebellion by seeking estrangement, rejection, and death. Insofar as Gregor's physical manifestation constitutes a translation of the interior self to the external world, “The Metamorphosis” is a stellar achievement of expressionism. (Hayman, 58)
Style and Technique
This novella is an extended literalization of the implications of the metaphor used in its initial sentence. Gregor is metamorphosed into an insect like species of vermin, with Kafka careful not to identify the precise nature of Gregor's bug hood. German usage applies Kafka's term, Ungeziefer, to contemptible, spineless, parasitic persons, akin to English connotations of the work “cockroach.” Gregor's passivity and abjectness before authority link him with these meanings, as Kafka develops the fable by transforming the metaphor back into the imaginative reality of his fiction. After all, Gregor's metamorphosis constitutes a revelation of the truth regarding his low self-esteem. It is a self-judgment by his repressed and continually defeated humanity. (Bouson, 81)
By having Gregor become a bug, Kafka has also accomplished a bitterly parodistic inversion of a traditional motif in fairy tales. In folktales the prince is rescued from his froghood by the princess's kiss; beauty redeems the beast with love. In Kafka's version, however, the “beauty,” the sister Gregor loves, is horrified by her beastlike brother and condemns him to die rather than changing him back through affection. The most poignant aspect of the story is the inextinguishable beauty of Gregor's soul, as he consents to his family's rejection of his humanity and dies on their behalf. (Hayman, 58)
Kafka illustrates Gregor's subjection to his father by the implied parable of the episode involving the lodgers. This triad duplicates the Samsa triad that excludes Gregor, with the middle lodger, like Mr. Samsa, exerting authority over his supporters. Initially they intimidate and threaten the Samsas. After Gregor's death, however, Mr. Samsa curtly orders these boarders out of the apartment, and they accede without a struggle—their apparently awesome power proves spurious. Equivalently, had Gregor found the self-confidence to revolt openly against both his firm and his father, had he walked out on his job and asserted his autonomy against his family's clutches, he, too, could have matured into triumphant adulthood and would not have needed the disguised hostility of his metamorphosis.
Works Cited
Bouson, J. Brooks.“The Narcissistic Drama and Reader/Text Transaction in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.” In Critical Essays on Franz Kafka, edited by Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Eggenschwiler, David.“The Metamorphosis, Freud, and the Chains of Odysseus.” In Modern Critical Views: Franz Kafka, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Gray, Ronald. “Franz Kafka.” Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Hayman, Ronald K. “A Biography of Kafka.” London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Karl, Frederick R. “Franz Kafka: Representative Man.” New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991
