The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a short story about a man who turns into a vermin. His family, the Samsas, instead of trying to help him, treats him cruelly and ostracizes him because of his uselessness and appearance. Kafka shows a dysfunctional family that exploits Gregor for its economic stability. The paper will try to analyze the text using the tenets of existentialism and how Kafka used them to portray Gregor and his society.
Gregor Samsas, the protagonist of the story is a travelling salesman, who wakes up in his bed to find that he has metamorphosized into a large insect. He is disgusted by his new body, with hard convex back and several legs. He reminisces about his job as a travelling salesman and how he would quit it if his parents did not rely on his income. He misses his train to work and realizes that he has overslept. His office manager comes to his home to enquire why Gregor had missed office and threatens that he would fire him from the job. However, Gregor fails to move manoeuvre due to his transformed body.
When Gregor finally manages to unlock the door, his manager is horrified with his appearance and flees away. Gregor’s father drives him back into the room using a cane and a newspaper. Gregor injures himself while running back into the room, where he falls asleep. Gregor loses the sense of taste and chooses rotting food scraps over milk, which was once his most favourite beverage. Soon he grows comfortable in his form and finds climbing the walls and ceiling amusing. Gregor is injured by his father, who throws an apple at him thinking that Gregor had attacked his wife. As the story progresses, Gregor loses the sense of taste completely and eats almost nothing. Eventually Gregor dies in his room and his family feels a great sense of relief. As for the Samsas, they move to a better apartment due to their substantial saving and months of spare living.
The Samsas initially used to think of Gregor as an object that satisfied their economic requirements; however, the Samsas starts considering Gregor as repulsive and useless once he metamorphosizes into a vermin. Kafka tries to show a family in which the evil side flourishes, while the good side wanes away. After Gregor changes into a vermin, his family tries to get rid of him. Instead of assisting Gregor, they plan to get rid of him because he had become a horrible useless giant insect. The irony in the story is that the family feels happy and hopeful upon Gregor’s death. The metamorphosis symbolizes dehumanizing of a human being.
Kafka uses Gregor's transformation into a vermin to satirize the cruel treatment that a family or society can incur on other human beings. He uses allegory to show the cruel sides of family and self-worthlessness. Gregor is treated as someone who is insignificant and is dehumanized not only literally, but also metaphorically. It creates a funny, yet sad interpretation of the society’s cruelty. The story also shows humanity that has lost touch with reality and expresses alienation through the metaphor of metamorphosis. Through the metaphor of Gregor’s transformation, Kafka wanted to mock the materialistic society, which was devoid of any emotions.
Kafka’s The Metamorphosis elaborately uses the idea of existentialists to depict that death renders everything meaningless in the world. Gregor develops a self identity only after changing into an insect and he alone has to determine what constitutes a moral action. Kafka portrays Gregor as an individual who lacks an identity. His identity solely revolves around fiscal matters and his social life is stagnant because he fails to assert a concrete existence. Gregor prioritize work over everything else and he is terrified when he transforms into an insect because he fears that he would miss his seven o’clock train. Gregor’s identity crisis conveys Kafka’s views about an exceedingly impersonal society where an excessively materialistic society drastically mitigates individualism
Kafka’s portrayal of Gregor in a nightmarish way was the quintessence of the whole human condition. No matter how many times Gregor tries to come to terms with the universe, he is caught in a series of accidents and incidents. The absurdity of the entire situation leads to estrangement of the protagonist. Gregor is caught in a dilemma of the notion of good and evil and is isolated because meaningful communication fails him. Gregor is in no man’s land as he is stuck between a state in which he once belonged and a present world which he fails to understand. Gregor is depicted in a hellish situation because he cannot make himself heard and understood. These nonsensical happenings depict the world from the existentialist perspective, a world devoid of a rational and comprehensive objective. Since there is nobody else in the story with whom he can tell his fate, he reflects his own problems again and again. Kafka uses the combination of plot and character to demonstrate his angst about a pointless existence.
“Self-sufficiency or independence from other people is another ideal that existentialism extols” (Roberts 9). The Metamorphosis addresses the lack of freedom of Gregor to show another existentialist tenet. Gregor is constrained by burdens such as earning money for his family. Despite having a choice to give up his job, he pursues it with feverish ardour. When Gregor transforms into a vermin, his sole concern is that he will miss his train to work. He never questions why and how he became a vermin and neither does Kafka. He works because of his belief to replace his father financially and lives in a delusion that that he has no choice. His belief about an absence of choice contrasts Kafka’s view that freedom is ubiquitous.
Walter H. Sokel claims that Gregor’s metamorphosis from himself and society is part of Marxist externalisation due to his work position. “Seeing himself as vermin, and being treated as such by his business and family, the travelling salesman Gregor Samsas literally turns into vermin (Sokel 105). Gregor is alienated in Marxist terms because he has to yield to his father. He cannot feel well in his work and cannot move freely in the society because of capitalist forces such as his family. Gregor is so much abused by his boss and by his family that the fear of not reaching work on time completely obscures the consequences of his grotesque physical metamorphosis.
The tragedy in The Metamorphosis is in the form of Gregor’s existence and the only solution for the tragedy is death. When Gregor wakes up, only his physical and perspective change, while his self appears the same. Through surrealism, Kafka shows a shift in spatial relations that suddenly restrict Gregor’s movements and world. His immediate obstacle after changing into an insect is his bed. Later on, he is barely able to reach the door-handle and his voice gradually changes into animal squeak. However, his memory and other mental faculties as a human being appear to be essentially unimpaired. The changes that Gregor perceive are not only from his perspective, but also conditioned by the world's reactions to his condition. The wound inflicted by Gregor’s father depicts a second change in relations that affects Gregor’s self. The external world is equally responsible for his Gregor’s death as it perceives his metamorphosis differently. They fail to understand that the protagonist is essentially human although he no longer has a human body.
The most inhuman aspect of the protagonist’s metamorphosis is the blindness with which society treats this change. Gregor’s identity is alien, void and non-existent to the outsiders along with his family members. Initially his mother and sister try to improve his condition and protect him, but later turn cold and become the cause of his death. Kafka tries to show that the most beautiful and tender relationships are based on illusions.
Gregor is highly under nourished on human necessities. In becoming a financial pillar of his home, his family devoid him from basic love and affection. Only after the change does Gregor realise that his father possessed more money than he knew about. Gregor’s metamorphosis into an insect is in a way aimed at seeking that unknown nourishment. Only after he becomes an insect, his sister tries to take care of him and his mother craves to see him in his room. The metamorphosis frees him from his enslavement to the empirical world. His death then is not a meaningless annihilation, but liberation. However, the story does not make any positive or negative statement about the metamorphosis.
The transformation from the beautiful beetle to the monstrous insect that the society sees is Kafka’s rising awareness that writing does not always result in exalted states of feeling but can also lead to a kind of living death. In his entry for August 6, 1914 in Kafka’s diary he states such a view:
What will be my fate as a writer is very simple. My talent for portraying my dreamlike inner life has thrust all other matters into the background; my life has dwindled dreadfully, nor will it cease to dwindle. Nothing else will ever satisfy me. But the strength I can muster for that portrayal is not to be counted upon: perhaps it has already vanished forever, perhaps it will come back to me again, although the circumstances of my life don’t favour its return. Thus I waver, continually fly to the summit of the mountain, but then fall back in a moment. Others waver too, but in lower regions, with greater strength; if they are in danger of falling, they are caught up by the kinsman who walks beside them for that very purpose. But I waver on the heights; it is not death, alas, but the eternal torments of dying (Brod 77).
Psychological interpretations of the text states that the insect remains something alien that cannot fit in the human world. It is “The Other”, beyond the reach of anyone’s imagination. That is why Kafka told his publisher not to draw any specific insect on the text’s cover page. The insect is something that cannot be drawn or defined and embodies the world that cannot be comprehended by human imagination.
Works Cited
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Ed. Paul Moliken. Prestwick House 2005.
Walter H. Sokel. ‘From Marx to Myth: The structure and Function of Self-Alienation in Kafka’s Metamorphosis’, in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Ed. Bloom, Harold. Infobase Publishing.2008.
Bloom, Harold. Hobby, Blake. Bloom’s Literary Themes, Rebirth and Renewal. Infobase Publishing. 2009
Brod, Max (ed.). The Diaries of Franz Kafka. New York: Schocken Books. 1949
