The Metamorphosis—Franz Kafka

Don't get around much anymore

Gregor, recollecting a sense of freedom

The Metamorphosis opens with one of the most famous lines in literature,

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Interestingly, that line has seen at least sixteen different English translations, because of an ambiguity in the German words, ungeheuren Ungeziefer, which describe what Gregor became, ranging from “giant bug” to “horrible vermin.” Apparently Kafka chose the word Ungeziefer rather than Insekt to suggest something morally repulsive, rather than just a big bug. I gather that Ungeziefer, originally meant something like, “unclean animal not fit for sacrificing.” If I have that right, Kafka’s choice of wording does not permit readers to react with sympathy as they might to a poor, overturned beetle struggling to right itself.

When he wakes up and finds himself changed into a horror, the first major challenge he faces consists simply in getting out of bed and onto his feet. At first, he doesn’t fully comprehend what has happened to him and he blames his current condition on stress from his job.

Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting job I’ve picked on! Traveling about day in, day out. It’s much more irritating work than doing the actual business in the office, and on top of that there’s the trouble of constant traveling, of worrying about train connections, the bed and irregular meals, casual acquaintances that are always new and never become intimate friends.

Yeah, I know how he feels. From that point on, we follow Gregor through the rest of his short miserable life as a large but weak and helpless insect. We follow Gregor’s plight, his thoughts and feelings, and his painful interactions with others in sharp, disturbing detail.

Over the course of the story, we learn the circumstances of Gregor and his family. His father had suddenly lost his business, forcing Gregor to take over supporting his parents and younger sister. A few years before the story begins, Gregor, a bachelor, took a stressful and unfulfilling job as a traveling sales rep. He now lives with his parents to save money. Beyond merely supporting them, he also plans to send his sister, Grete, to a music conservatory to study violin.

Since nothing like a plot ever develops, the reader might wonder about Kafka’s point in writing this story. A person who turns into an insect could symbolize many things, and one could feel that the story must surely contain an allegorical message of some sort. But after that opening line I quoted, The Metamorphosis doesn’t have the distant, fairy-tale quality that allegories often have. If Gregor represents some abstract concept or some social class, why do we enter so vividly into his mind? Why all the details about performing the simplest tasks? Any message Kafka might have hidden in the story gets swamped by irrelevant detail.

Slowly Gregor pushed the chair toward the door, then let go of it, caught hold of the door for support—the soles at the end of his little legs were somewhat sticky—and rested against it for a moment after his efforts. Then he set himself to turning the key in the lock with his mouth. It seemed, unhappily, that he hadn’t really any teeth—what could he grip the key with? —but on the other hand his jaws were certainly very strong; with their help he did manage to set the key in motion, heedless of the fact that he was undoubtedly damaging them somewhere, since a brown fluid issued from his mouth, flowed over the key, and dripped on the floor.

Ick. The approach to literature I’ve recently taken—to avoid interpretation—makes The Metamorphosis quite challenging, begging as it does for some meaning other than “some guy turns into a bug, stays at home, and dies.” How can one make any sense of it without some sort of interpretation? What does Gregor’s ex-military father represent? And what about the chief clerk who wants to investigate Gregor’s tardiness, or the younger, musical sister? The metamorphosis itself?

I prefer to read it simply as a story, not a message disguised as a story. Reading it that way, we might enter into Gregor’s mind and suffer along with him. But how seriously can we take his plight?

Pretty seriously, I would say, since anyone who lives long enough sooner or later faces a debilitating illness or accident that thrusts them into a world much like Gregor’s. Right as he wakes up, Gregor realizes he has overslept and cannot make the train to work on time. Struggle as he might, however, he cannot simply hop out of bed. Nor does his transformation reverse itself. Instead, he reluctantly comes to grips with the fact that life for him has forever changed into a series of physical challenges. I think we can all identify with someone who faces one problem after another while simply coping with mundane tasks.

But wait, it gets worse. Gregor’s condition makes it not only hard for him to move around, but also hard to speak so that others understand him. He can hear and understand himself clearly enough, but to others his voice makes no sense at all. In fact, even his family comes to think of him as nonhuman. Because he cannot communicate, they think he cannot understand them either. Thus, they speak unguardedly to each other in his presence. But he understands everything they say, and often their words hurt.

Whatever else Kafka may be doing with this story, he has succeeded in imagining the world through Gregor’s alienated and dehumanized eyes so thoroughly that we find ourselves drawn into it. Somewhere in my reading, Gregor’s pitiful efforts to cope began to clarify into a condition that felt quite familiar to me.

I had a major operation, at the age of ten, during which I apparently received a transfusion of bad blood, saddling me with a puzzling illness that kept me in bed for three years. During those years of confinement in my room, my mother taught piano in the living room, just across the hall. As my parents had divorced and I had no brothers or sisters, my only contacts with the outside world besides my mother came through a home-bound tutor from school who dropped off and picked up homework once a week, and some neighborhood kids who would sometimes tap on my window. Gregor, too, liked the window.

Often he just lay there the long nights through without sleeping at all, scrabbling for hours on the leather. Or he nerved himself for the great effort of pushing an armchair to the window sill and, braced against the chair, leaned against the windowpanes, obviously in some recollection of the sense of freedom that looking out of a window used to give him.

I remember listening to the piano lessons and hearing my mother talk animatedly to other people I never saw. I remember looking forward to the weekly visit from the tutor.

But although Gregor could get no news directly, he overheard a lot from the neighboring rooms, and as soon as voices were audible, he would run to the door of the room concerned and press his whole body against it.

I had stayed in the hospital long enough to become temporarily bedridden, so Gregor’s struggle to get out of bed brought back memories of how shocked I felt when my legs gave out from under me the first time I tried standing. In short, I recognized Gregor’s experiences as those of a long-term, often overlooked invalid. Fortunately, I got better.

Kafka could have picked any sort of debility to explain Gregor’s confinement to his room—tuberculosis, a war injury, leprosy—but he chooses to make it something that almost forces those around Gregor to forget his humanity. Only his sister cares for him by bringing him scraps of food and talking to him as she might to a houseplant. But even she soon starts talking to herself about him in third person in his presence. To convey such alienation without sinking into pathos, Kafka makes Gregor into a bug. Should Gregor merely suffer from an illness, even a mysterious one, others would smother him with their attention, caregiving, and love. But this particular affliction repulses everyone. No one even recognizes his struggle, weakness, and pain. He injures himself trying to get back into his room one time, but yucky hemolymph drips from his body instead of blood. Who could feel sympathy for that?

Because he does not have the appearance of a sick or injured person, he receives no medical attention. Before his family sees him, they think he has overslept because of some illness, so they send for a doctor. But as soon as they see his condition, they change their minds. Instead of trying to fix him, or even understand the exact nature of his present state, they shut him in his room and lock him out of their sight. True, they hold out hope for a while that he might magically transform back to his former condition, but that hope soon fades.

All the while his family ignores him, he in turn continues to care and worry about them. He watches them adjust to his absence. He notices how they treat each other. He sees them struggling to make do without his assistance. They pick up odd jobs, take on ungrateful boarders, and sell off their belongings. Gregor feels responsible for the miserable condition into which he watches them sink. He can no longer help them. He can only keep out of sight.

The story, as I said, seems to beg for interpretations, and many critics have answered the call, offering psychological, religious, and feminist readings. But I say the story stands on its own six legs without it needing anyone to transform it into something Kafka did not write. Gregor’s plight reveals our own humanity or lack thereof. We see the world through his compound eyes; but we also understand how the family sees him. We learn how dehumanization feels from both sides. Despite the story’s impossibility, or maybe because of it, we feel its emotional tone all the more sharply. Have you ever felt alienated? Try changing into an ungeheuren Ungeziefer.

Some commentators condemn the family’s coldness toward Gregor or Grete’s betrayal of him, but I say the only reason we readers feel any resentment toward them comes from our having such deep insight into Gregor’s inner life. Without that, we would only read about a large, disgusting, inarticulate Ungeziefer that leaves sticky goo wherever it crawls, and prefers rotted to fresh food. Little would we suspect such a creepy-crawly to have a sensitive soul.

The Metamorphosis can and should speak to us all, right here, right now. More so now than I’ve seen in my lifetime, we need to think seriously about dehumanization: what it feels like from both sides, what it looks like from a distance, how easily and unwittingly we can slip into it. Otherwise, we could easily find ourselves thinking of our fellow humans as unclean animals, not fit for sacrificing.

§ § §

For next week, I plan to read another short work, “The Turn of the Screw,” by Henry James. Further, since I expect to finish reading Greenblatt’s biography of Shakespeare in a few days, I will probably return to reading some Elizabethan plays, most likely, starting with Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as nice followups on the theme of dehumanization and seeing the humanity of others.

Since my last post about Sartre’s book, Nausea, the Decade Project has undergone a dramatic surge in interest on Substack. I still have not adjusted to such a large audience. So, please bear with me as I sort things out.

I want to welcome all the new subscribers to the Decade Project and to the new Slo-Mo Philosophy group. While I hope you will want to follow both, it won’t offend me if you only wish to receive notices for one and not the other. If you go to this link you can control from which one you receive posts. Remember, The Decade Project has no paywall, but Slo-Mo Philosophy does.

Works mentioned in this post

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James

The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe,

The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare

Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt