ABSTRACT – FRANZ KAFKA – METAMORPHOSIS. Here is a brilliant and truly
horrible fable surrealist fable by Kafka, in which the doomed Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover that he has turned into a giant beetle cockroach like insect in the night. (Don’t you just hate it when that happens?). Samsa struggles to right himself, and get out of bed. He wants to call for help, but he can no longer speak. As he comes to terms with the shocking and never explained transformation, (Arguably presented as a metaphor for a social disease) his family, and his employers arrive outside his
bedroom door to call to him, trying to find out why he is late for work. Gregor manages to get up, and then uses his mouth to turn the key in his bedroom door, though it cuts him. As the door opens, Gregor sees the shock, fear and revulsion of his loved ones. They force him to retreat back into his bedroom. His father even throws things at him, including an apple at him. (Symbolic of Original Sin, and how we inherit the sins of our parents), The apple hits Gregor in the back and sinks into his carapace, where it will stay rotting and giving him great pain. Gregor is now confined to his room as the family try to live their
lives as if nothing has happened. They
simply never refer to his plight and make excuses for him. Only his sister tries to see any humanity in him as she feeds him household
rubbish. Eventually, even she comes to reject him, and Gregor is left alone to die a slow and lonely death. When he dies, his family simply throw his carcass out as rubbish and go off to
live their lives together without him. This is a bitter, brooding twisted tale. Strangely however, it is the family who are made to seem monstrous, with Gregor treated with enormous sympathy. Kafka never got on well with his own father, which shows strongly in this story. Gregor, like K in The Trial has done nothing to deserve such a horrible fate. He is just a victim finding everyone he knows and loves turning against him at his time of greatest need. Sad, horrible, but compulsive reading.