The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

 

The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis begins with its most extraordinary sentence and never explains it: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.' Kafka proceeds from this premise with complete narrative composure, attending not to the transformation's cause or mechanism but to its immediate practical consequences. Gregor is going to be late for work. How will he turn the key with no hands?

This tonal commitment — treating the absurd with the same serious attention one might give a plumbing problem — is the story's central technical achievement. The humor is real; so is the horror. Gregor's first concern is the train he has missed, his manager who will be displeased, his family's dependence on his income. He has been a traveling salesman for years, hating every moment of it, unable to quit because the income is servicing his family's debt. The transformation has, in one sense, simply made the terms of his situation visible.

The family's response unfolds with a psychological accuracy that is the more disturbing for being so entirely recognizable. Initially there is shock and improvised accommodation. Grete, the sister, takes on the task of feeding him, approaching the problem with the practical dedication of someone who needs to be useful. The father, confronted with a son who can no longer be the family's financial support, reverts quickly to a hostility that suggests the previous warmth was more conditional than it appeared.

Gregor's interiority remains human throughout — he understands his situation, he feels his family's discomfort, he hears the violin his sister plays, he is moved by it in ways that suggest his human consciousness is not diminished, only imprisoned in a form that cannot express or sustain it. This is Kafka's specific cruelty: Gregor is fully present inside his condition, experiencing everything that happens to him with complete comprehension.

The lodgers who eventually move into the apartment — and whose comfort takes precedence over Gregor's existence — are the story's most pointed social observation. Strangers with money are immediately more real, more deserving of consideration, than a family member who has lost his economic function.

The Metamorphosis is a story about what Gregor was before the transformation: already alienated, already exhausted, already defined entirely by his usefulness to others. The insect is just the metaphor made literal, the estrangement that was always there given a form the family can see and, eventually, cannot tolerate.

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