The metamorphosis of Gregor was not his choice. We can see it in the first sentence of the book: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin” (Kafka, 1). We can see that he was surprised by the fact that he is not a human anymore. Even though it was a long time when he stopped to feel himself as a person, not an ugly insect. He was working hard to earn money for the family that even did not appreciate his efforts.
When Greta and a mother started to move human’s furniture from the Gregor’s room, we can understand that it was the final part where they stopped to consider Gregor to be a part of their family. They saw only a disgusting bug that has never been their kin.
We can see that there is a huge difference in being human and being humane. If we look at the attitude of the parents and Gregor’s sister towards him, we can find Gregor-bug to be more humane than his family. He does not try to hurt them, he is hiding each time they enter the room just to not scare them by the new appearance. On the contrary, we can see the family that is telling abusive words about Gregor, they are making noises, trying to hurt the bug, forget to give him food, stopped to clean his room, at some point they even forgot they had Gregor as a family member.
According to the Darwinism such a metamorphosis could not happen. It violates all the laws of the nature and cannot happen in a real life. As Warren Brackmen indicates in his article: “the story runs contrary to Darwinism also because Gregor's transformation into a beetle reverses the assumed path of evolutionary change”. (Breckman)
I think that personal environment has influenced on the story. As we can learn from the biography of the writer, he was very sick. Sometimes hardly-ill person feels itself as a burden to the family, something that distract them from everyday life, some kind of awful bug that suddenly enters the life of the family and replace a close person, something you have to live with. The personal feelings and emotions could have been the starting point in the writing of this novel.
In my opinion, this story can be considered as funny-grotesque. It ends with the death of Gregor, it describes pain of the creature that was a human, it shows that we are needed only when we are useful.
Works cited
Breckman, Warren. "Kafka's Metamorphosis In His Time And In Ours". Penn Reading Project Lecture(2000): n. pag. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
Kafka, Franz. "Metamorphosis". The Project Gutenberg. N.p., 1912. Web. 10 Apr. 2016.
