![]() Many subsequent details in Kafka’s story are similarly downplayed, or treated in a calm and ordinary way as if a man becoming a six-feet-tall insect is the most normal occurrence in the world, and this is part of the comedy of Kafka’s novella: an aspect of his work which many readers miss, partly because the comedic is so often the first thing lost in translation.Īnd, running contrariwise to the interpretation of ‘The Metamorphosis’ that sees it as ‘just’ a straightforward story about modern-day alienation and mistreatment of ‘the other’ is the plot itself, which sees Gregor Samsa freed from his life of servitude and duty, undertaking a job he doesn’t enjoy in order to support a family that, it turns out, are perfectly capable of supporting themselves (first by the father’s money which has been set aside, and then from the family’s jobs which the mother, father, and daughter all take, and discover they actually rather enjoy).Įven Gregor’s climbing of the walls and ceiling in his room, when he would have been travelling around doing his job, represents a liberation of sorts, even though he has physically become confined to one room. So the effect of this opening paragraph is to play down, as soon as it has been introduced, the shocking revelation that a man has been turned into a beetle (or similar creature). Indeed, the everyday already is a nightmare, and Samsa’s metamorphosis into an alien creature is just the latest in a long line of modernity’s hellish developments. ![]() This is a trademark feature of Kafka’s writing, and one of the things the wide-ranging term ‘Kafkaesque’ should accommodate: the nightmarish and the everyday rubbing shoulders together. For no sooner has Gregor discovered that he has been transformed, inexplicably, into a giant insect (or ‘vermin’), than his thoughts have turned from this incredible revelation to more day-to-day worries about his job and his travelling. The opening sentence – as with the very first sentence of Kafka’s novel, The Trial – is well-known, but what follows this arresting first statement is just as remarkable. What did Kafka mean by such a story? Is it a comedy, a tragedy, or both? Gregor’s social isolation from his nearest and dearest, and subsequent death (a death of despair, one suspects, as much as it is a noble sacrifice for the sake of his family), all suggest the story’s tragic undercurrents, and yet the way Kafka establishes Gregor’s transformation raises some intriguing questions. This is one reason why ‘The Metamorphosis’ has become so widely discussed, analysed, and studied: its meaning is not straightforward, its fantastical scenario posing many questions. ![]() Gregor’s subsequent treatment at the hands of his family, his family’s lodgers, and their servants may well strike a chord with not just ethnic minorities living in some communities but also disabled people, people with different cultural or religious beliefs from ‘the mainstream’, struggling artists whose development is hindered by crass bourgeois capitalism and utilitarianism, and many other marginalised individuals. Much as those who wish to denigrate a particular group of people – immigrants, foreigners, a socio-economic underclass – often reach for words like ‘cockroaches’ or ‘vermin’, so Gregor’s transformation physically enacts and literalizes such emotive propaganda.īut of course, the supernatural or even surreal (though we should reject the term ‘Surrealist’) setup for the story also means that ‘The Metamorphosis’ is less a straightforward allegory (where X = Y) than it is a more rich and ambiguous exploration of the treatment of ‘the other’ (where X might = Y, Z, or even A, B, or C). ![]() The vagueness is part of the effect: Gregor Samsa is any and every unworthy or downtrodden creature, shunned by those closest to him. The point is that we are not supposed to know the precise thing into which Gregor has metamorphosed. Kafka did use the word Insekt in his correspondence discussing the book, but ordered that the creature must not be explicitly illustrated as such at any cost. For this reason, some translators (such as David Wyllie in the one we have linked to above) reach for the word vermin, which is probably closer to the German original. ![]()
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