Metamorphosis

“Metamorphosis” was published in 1915, it was written by Frank Kafka. Kafkawas a Jewish German. In the novella it tells a story from a third person point of view, he awakens to find himself an insect. In “Metamorphosis” by Frank Kafka, family is a major theme throughout the whole novella. Family is a group of people that are related to each other by birth or marriage. When you are in a family you care, love, and support one another. Gregor’s transformation isn’t the central idea or huge change in the novella. The family’s reaction toward Gregor changes from before they discover his insect form to his death.

In section one, Gregor wakes up and discovers he has physically transformed into an insect. “His boss would certainly come round with the doctor from the medical insurance company, accuse his parents of having a lazy son,” (Kafka 6). Gregor consciously ignore the fact that he is a vermin and tries to get up and due the daily routine he does every morning. This quote also says a lot about Gregor’s selflessness toward his family. The first thing that goes through Gregor’s mind about not calling in sick is not what his boss or doctor would do or say to Gregor, but what would they say to his parents. Kafka gives us a little preview of Gregor’s feelings toward his family and his role. Time passes by for him in bed, his family starts to notice that he isn’t up and going to work. “Gregor? Aren’t you well? Do you need anything?” (Kafka 8).

The family’s reaction towards this is concern, the mother in tears sends Gregor’s sister, Grete to call a doctor since she thinks he is ill. The father’s reaction was to tell the housekeeper to call a locksmith to unlock Gregor’s door. The family’s concern is just a facade of the family’s fear of losing their only source of income every month. As the family discovers the big reveal of Gregor’s new form the mother, father, and sister react to it, but deals with it differently. “With a hostile expression his father clenched his fist, as if to drive Gregor back into his room” (Kafka 14). The father’s reaction is off the back anger, while the mother faints. As if in that moment they realize how completely their lives was about the change. In just one morning the family relationship with Gregor is completely shattered and now the roles are reserved. The family no longer is able to depend on Gregor so forces all of them to find work. Gregor’s physical change begins the family’s life changes.

In section two, Gregor begins to reminisce, “He felt very proud that he had been able to provide such a life in so nice an apartment for his parents and his sister. But what now if all the peace, the comfort, the contentment were to come to a horrible end?” (Kafka 34-35) Kafka gives the readers a glimpse of Gregor’s old responsibilities for the family before the transformation. He was the sole breadwinner of the family; he was able to give to his family. As a bug now, he isn’t able to provide for his family anymore in which he feels horrible about.

The family’s reaction and feeling about Gregor’s transformation honestly shows in this section of the novella. “His mother, incidentally, began relatively soon to want to visit Gregor, but his father and his sister at first held her back … and cried out, ‘Let me go to Gregor, he is my unfortunate boy! Don’t you understand that I have to go to him?'” (Kafka 30). Gregor’s mother still loves her son,even when the father was about to kill Gregor. However, although his mother loves him unable to see Gregor. The father reaction to Gregor is angry. “Gregor saw his mother run up to his father …but now Gregor’s sight went dim – her hands clasping his father’s neck, begged for Gregor’s life.” The father goes as far to almost killing Gregor, but the mother stops him.

The only person in the family that has any contact with him is his sister Grete. “To find out his likes and dislikes, she brought him a wide assortment of things all spread on an old newspaper” (Kafka 37). She would care for him like he did before the transformation. Only Grete visits Gregor while his mother and father would just avoid him because of his vermin form. Another thing the family begins to do in the second section is dehumanized Gregor. Suggest by his sister, she thinks he would be more comfortable with less furniture so he can crawl around. By taking away his furniture it shows how the family view Gregor. They don’t view him as a son or a brother, they view him as a bug and if he is a bug he will enjoy the more room he has to crawl. “They were clearing his room out; taking away everything he loved;” (Kafka 33).

This proves their family theory wrong, as Gregor still thinks he is a human although his physically form and voice. Although the father seems angry for Gregor transformation he is somewhat happy about it, he is able to go back to work and become the man of the house again. Since before Gregor was the man because of him providing the family for all those years. Although all have jobs they still aren’t able to make ends meet, they go as far as into renting two rooms.

In final and third section of the novella, it shows the family completely new feeling about Gregor. When Gregor decides to make an appearance in front of the tenants which causes them to move out without paying any rent. “The apple remained imbedded in his flesh … it was the commandment of family duty to swallow their disgust and endure him, endure him and nothing more.” (Kafka 38) The family realizes that they can never get rid of Gregor and have to deal with him because he is techinally family. Another result of Gregor’s appearance is that Grete stops visiting him, but feeds him although she doesn’t even step inside the room to give him his food. “I won’t utter my brother’s name in the presence of this creature.” (Kafka 47).

Grete was the only one that showed affection to her brother, but her saying this it shows how her love for her brother isn’t there anymore. She completely dehumanizes him and that was the final straw foe Gregor. Gregor didn’t mind that his mother and father didn’t see him as human, but with Grete it was different. Many times in the novella Gregor expresses his love for his sister, she was the reason why he left his room so he can see her play the violin. With her gone from his life Gregor has nothing left to live for. He slowly begins to kill himself, as to not eating.

Eventually one day the servant finds him day and the family takes a day off from work and ride into town. “Leaning back comfortably in their seats, they discussed their prospects for the time to come … Mr. and Mrs. Samsa thought that it would soon be time, too, to find her a good husband. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of the ride their daughter got up first and stretched her young body. (Kafka 56) With Gregor’s death the family making a celebration of it and even thinks about the future of her daughter. As if a weight is lifted off their shoulders and can finally think of a better future.

The family view of Gregor changes through each section. Each section their love for him either was gone or was slowly leaving. In the end the family all in agreement didn’t feel a thing for him which lead to Gregor’s suicide.

The Metamorphosis is arguably Franz Kafkas best works of literature where author, Franz Kafka, directly casts upon the negative aspects of his life both mentally and physically. Franz Kafka was a visionary, whose works contained the secret to the future. Kafka’s world is one of a kind. To Kafka popular culture portrays contrast between functional and dysfunctional families to frame the elements that contribute to their formation. In similar pursuit, Kafka recognizes one significant aspect in the establishment of a healthy and stable family.

In The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka applies symbols, imagery, and settings to impress that a family organization where equally shared responsibilities prevail is more effective in keeping a positive domestic atmosphere. Also Kafka demonstrates the absurdity of human life and the sense of alienation of human existence, a reflection of Kafka’s own life. “Because the notion of bug aptly characterized his sense of worthlessness and parasitism before his father. ” (Neider 262). When Franz Kafka was a boy his father abused him.

Whenever Kafka disagreed with his father or told his father that he wanted to be a writer, his father got very upset with him. Franz was expected to follow the course his father planned out for him. “But from his childhood he considered himself a disappointment to his authoritarian figure parent and inadequate when compared with him. ” (Czech 255). Kafka’s father viewed Franz as a failure and disapproved of his writing because he wanted Franz to become a businessman like him. This obsession with wanting Franz to become a businessman led his father Herrman to beat his son.

There was always a great tension between Kafka and his father; Kafka always had strong mixed feelings toward him. Franz had other siblings but he was left all alone to struggle with the mantle of his father’s expectations and frustrations. The relationship between Gregor and his father is in many ways were similar to Franz and his father Herrman. The emotional and physical abuse Gregor goes through is reciprocal to what Kafka went through in real life. They were both abused and neglected by their fathers when they were disappointed with them.

“The mother and sister almost survive the test, but the father rejects him from the start. (Angus 264). The relationship with his father was reflected in Kafka’s, The Metamorphosis. In the book, Mr. Samsa displayed a violent temper from the very first encounter with the transformed Gregor. “When he chased Greggor back into the room, he kicked him in the back as he reached for the door. ” (Kafka). Kafka illustrates that imbalance in family responsibility results in resentment and hatred. “All our knowledge of Kafka’s life and story technique suggests that it is a precipitation in fantasy of his lifelong sense of loneliness and exclusion. ” (Angus 264).

Quite apart from his isolation within his family, Kafka also felt isolated from the rest of society. Both Samsa and Kafka experienced the difficulties of living in a modern society and the struggle for acceptance of others when in a time of need. Also the lack of affection in Kafka’s childhood is a cause of feeling isolation that both Samsa and Kafka felt. Kafka never seemed to keep a wife. He was engaged twice but both times he was the one that ended the engagement. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa says “Constantly seeing new faces, no relationships that last or get more intimate. (Kafka).

Gregor Samsa was a character that endured seclusion and exile like no other. Gregor adopts the precaution “of locking all the doors during the night even at home. ” (Kafka). In this quote, the lock symbolizes Gregor’s wish to isolate himself from his family and society due to his anger. “Into a room in which Gregor ruled the bare walls all alone, no human being inside Grete was ever likely to set foot. ” (Kafka 34). The way Samsa was portrayed by his own family was the main cause of the feelings in which Gregor felt.

His family purely the basis of the isolationism. Throughout the book, The Metamorphosis, Kafka creates Gregor to express his own feelings of isolation and alienation. “Reminded even his father that Gregor was a member of the family, in spite contrary, it was the commandment of family duty to swallow their disgust and endure him, endure him and nothing more. ” (Kafka). Kafka, in a similar situation, uses Gregor transforming into a bug as a way of exaggerating himself, trying to express his feelings and point of view.

Kafka saw the world much as he describes in his novels, just as a man who feels himself to be persecuted sees reality fitting into a system, which is really of a spiritual order, to persecute him. ” (Spender 257). Kafka who had the pressure of his father forcing his own occupation on him resulted in a negative way. It was the main reason that caused Kafka’s animosity towards his father. Kafka’s father already forced him to do what he wanted and not what Kafka wanted. This is similar to Gregor’s work life as a salesman. Gregor is not working for himself but to pay the family’s debt; he is unsatisfied with his occupation.

Gregor Samsa is the only provider in the family he gives his family a nice atmosphere making them all feel economic security. Gregor’s atmosphere is one his family wouldn’t understand. He has the burden of finance on just him, only a single person results and this results in bitterness and anger. Kafka implies that in order to achieve a healthy family atmosphere, all members must contribute equally to common causes. Kafka uses symbols to contrast the difference in mood between the unequal and equal shares in financial responsibility of the Samsa’s family.

He also uses imagery and settings to provide a transition between positive and negative opposition as a result of the shift towards balance and evenness of responsibility. His message is about domestic stability. The first page of The Metamorphosis is Gregor’s transformation. This tends to leave many readers confused at what’s actually going on. “Kafka states in the first sentence that Gregor wakes up to find himself changed into a giant kind of vermin (“Ungeziefer”). The term “vermin” holds the key to the double aspect of The Metamorphosis. ” (Sokel 267). When you think vermin you think, bug.

According to the dictionary a vermin is “noxious, objectionable, or disgusting animals collectively, especially those of small size that appear commonly and are difficult to control. ” You think its just something that lives off human beings and maybe sucks their blood. However in context to The Metamorphosis “On the other hand, it connotes something defenseless, something that can be stepped upon and crushed. ” (Sokel 267). These words are proven to be a correlation to how Gregor Samsa felt in The Metamorphosis. This is how Kafka felt about himself. He uses Gregor to expand upon what and how he felt.

He felt this way relating back to his father. Kafka’s father viewed him as a vermin. “Kafka’s famous letter to his father would give support to such a view since Kafka has his father refer to him as a blood-sucking type of vermin, a bedbug or a louse. ” (Sokel 267). Franz Kafka channels his real insecurities into his writing by attributing them to his protagonist, Gregor. The transformation from human to insect depicted in his novel represents the author’s childhood loss of confidence and self-esteem. The Kafkaesque nightmare of The Metamorphosis mimics the authors own life.

The poetic of Kafka consists in endowing the absurd with coherence. The metamorphosis of the protagonist in an insect can be understood as the dehumanization and the alienation of the human being in a Capitalist society. Gregor feels strange and misunderstood in a hostile and incompressible environment. With the transformation, he becomes aware of his loneliness and undervaluation in the scenarios in which he develops; work and family.

The reflection of the individual in his relationship with society and the family is the place where the development of this economic-philosophical problem arises, literarily addressed by Kafka. The transformation by itself does not represent a primary aspect of the novel. If this were the case, the author would undoubtedly have deepened this problem by specifying more clearly what is the transformation and how it occurred. The figure of the insect is just a symbol, an image, a metaphor the author uses to narrate the terrible circumstances surrounding the unfortunate man in his interaction with his environment under his new conditions.

Gregor Samsa embodies and represents the existence of millions of people who, moved by the hidden threads of a programmed, secret and machine mechanism that activates and converts them into enslaved automatons, embody the docility and obedience of the norms. People are shown as passive defenders of the system that exploits and oppresses them. The story is not only about Gregor’s transformation, is about the metamorphosis of his entire family. The Capitalist society transforms them into objects of labor.

Kafka, beyond his own intentions, proposes the work in a Capitalistic society, as an activity external to the worker, where they do not feel happy, but unfortunate. This economic and political regime that has shaped our society, imposes a common order and denies individuality as dangerous. Gregor Samsa is a symbol of the process of alienation suffered by the man who lives in Capitalism, unable to get out of bed without thinking, “What a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen! Traveling day in and day out.

Doing business like this take much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that, there’s the curse of traveling worries about making train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!” When Gregor sees himself transformed into an insect, he worries about his job and how he will provide money for his family instead of worry about himself.

Overwhelmed with the work and life he has, Gregor wants to be fired. Nevertheless, he has to endure the exploitation to which he is subjected because he supports his family and had debts to pay, “If I didn’t have my parents to think about I’d have given in my notice a long time ago, I’d have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel…There is still some hope; once I’ve got the money together to pay off my parents’ debt to him – another five or six years suppose.” Before transforming into an insect, the main character was a cloth merchant.

His task was to make long and exhausting trips to get customers to buy those goods, a job that barely allowed him time because he was forced to use most of his free time to study new itineraries to make more profitable trips. With this information, can we develop the alienation of Gregor? We are in presence of a worker whose job is to sell a strange people a product that he does not produce. However, Gregor has another job as a hobby, carpentry.

From this work, Gregor has produced an object for himself. This item is a frame, with which he framed the photograph of the woman with a fur hat and fur boa, and of which her mother speaks proudly to the manager in the first part of the story, “Above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housing in a nice, gilded frame.” When Grete and the mother intend to remove the furniture from Gregor’s room, he pounces on the photo because he doesn’t want that they take it away from him. The photography is a link with his humanity.

Maybe without a specific purpose, he is protecting an object that is truly human, that is a result of a human work, an object that he has produced for himself, that represents him as a human, “He hurried up onto the picture and pressed himself against its glass, it held him firmly and felt good on his hot belly. This picture at least, now totally covered by Gregor, would certainly be taken away for no-one.”

The same can be said when he mentions that he saw the tools he kept in his closet and his mom and sister try to remove them making him feel more hurt, “They were clearing his room out; taking away everything he loved; the chest in which he kept his fret saw and other tools was already dragged off; they were now loosening the writing desk which had almost sunk into the floor, the desk at which he had done all his homework when he was at the commercial academy.”

Gregor cannot escape the absurd competition between human beings, typical of the Capitalist system that sometimes make the co-worker look like an enemy, “And even if he did catch the train he wouldn’t avoid a row with the chief since the firm’s porter would have been waiting for the five o’clock train and would have long since reported his failure to turn up.

The porter was a creature of the chief’s, spineless and stupid. Well, supposing he were to say he was sick? But that would be most unpleasant and would look suspicious since during his five years’ employment he had not been ill once. The chief himself would be sure to come with the sick-insurance doctor, would reproach his parents with their son’s laziness and would cut all excuses short by referring to the insurance doctor, who of course regarded all mankind as perfectly healthy malingering.

” Therefore, he is affected by the alienation produced by private property, the division of labor and the Capitalist mode of production. With this, the protagonist represents the scheme of the alienated worker, a worker whose life is practically reduced to his work. Under this vision, the whole work would represent the dehumanization of Gregor taken to the extreme, comparing the alienated worker with an insect.

In this way, in The Metamorphosis, we witness the process of total dehumanization of the alienated worker that culminates in death. In the first part, Gregor still feels among humans despite having woken up a while ago and become transformed into an insect, “They had realized, though, that there was something wrong with him, and were ready to help.

The first response to his situation had been confident and wise, and that made him feel better. He felt that he had been drawn back in among people, and from the doctor and the locksmith he expected great and surprising achievements.” During the second part, Gregor is going to dehumanize. When he begins to climb the walls and his sister thinks about removing the furniture from the room to facilitate this, Gregor starts to accepting the animal inside him.

However, at the moment in which the mother reminds the daughter that the human Gregor would not have wanted that the things that tied him to his human side were taking away from him, Gregor begins to realize that he is becoming an animal and resists it. On the contrary, in the third part, Gregor seems to accept his transformation in an animal. He is even aggressive with the new assistant, and he no longer cares about the consideration of others when he stops cleaning himself.

He is even dazzled by the violin his sister is playing, thinking that maybe he has become an animal because he attracts so much music. It is important to remember that Gregor in the first part mentions that he has never been linked to music, which leads to the idea that an alienated worker does not have time for anything beyond his work, making him unable to appreciate music, “Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?” “With his sister alone had he remained intimate, and it was a secret plan of his that she, who loved music, unlike himself.” Capitalism prevents people from living their own life. It deprives them of freedom and independence.

The exhaustion and resulting disinterest in doing things you would normally take great care to do may seem familiar to capitalist workers. Grete is not free from alienation and the effects of work. Gregor’s sister, who before the metamorphosis was quite immature, had only one mission in life, sleep as much as she wants, take care of herself, and play the violin. She was the one who was closest to her brother, and he was thinking of paying for music studies at the conservatory for her. The girl’s life turns upside down when Gregor becomes an insect. Little by little, she goes from worrying about his beloved brother to completely repudiate him.

An example of how the alienation of work consumes people and transforms them into individuals with no feelings is when Gregor hears his sister crying in the next room in the first part of the story and think about the possibility that she is doing it just because he can lose his job and not because something really serious had happened to him, “Why was she crying? Because he wouldn’t get up and let the chief clerk in, because he was in danger of losing his job, and because the chief would begin dunning his parents again for the old debts?” The foundation of the relationship of this family seems to be solely monetary, no love or affection. When Gregor stopped providing for his family, they become aggressive and distasteful toward him.

The father is even aggressive with him, “It was an apple; a second apple followed immediately; Gregor came to a stop in alarm; there was no point in running on, for his father was determined to bombard him. He had filled his pockets with fruit from the dish on the sideboard and was now shying apple after apple, without taking particularly good aim for the moment.” In the second part, Grete worries about the food, hygiene, and well-being of her brother transformed into a bug. She still not working.

But in the third part, she starts working as a sales assistant while studying shorthand and French with the aim of obtaining a better job, spending a lot of time on all these tasks of work and study. By not having so much free time, she does not devote the same attention to his brother and manages to ignore him. So, once she transforms into another alienate worker, she does not care about the small but important things in life like taking care of her brother, “We have to try and get rid of it,” said Gregor’s sister, now speaking only to her father, as her mother was too occupied with coughing to listen, “it’ll be the death of both of you, I can see it coming.

We can’t all work as hard as we have to and then come home to be tortured like this, we can’t endure it. I can’t endure it anymore.” Another example is her music. In the end, she plays the violin for the three visitors in the house, but after a while, it ceases to interest them. Is it possible that they really did not like it because she played badly? Maybe since she works, she is not able to play the violin as long as before. She has been able to lose practice because of the work that prevents her from developing her human ability, what is really important for her, “Indeed, they were making it more than obvious that they had been disappointed in their expectation of hearing good or enjoyable violin-playing.”

Karl Marx once said, “The devaluation of the human world grows in the direct ratio of the valorization of the world of things.” Gregor’s father is a man who went bankrupt in his business and contracted a series of large debts that his son was responsible for paying with effort. While Gregor supported the family, he spent five years without work. Although we do not know the age of the father, it must be an older man. He no longer has the vigor that he once possessed.

With the metamorphosis of Gregor, the father is forced to work. In the second part, the father gets a job in a bank where they make him wear a blue livery as a uniform. Something changes in the father when he starts working. First is the is the shift from a kind of vagrancy to an attitude always ready to work. This is evidenced by his obstinacy of never taking off his uniform. Constantly wearing his uniform, degrades him as a human being exemplifying another object in the Capitalistic society, “With a kind of mulishness his father persisted in keeping his uniform on even in the house.”

Also, the day of Gregor’s transformation, the father seems to be only worried about family’s finances. He attacks Gregor in some many ways, for example, throwing apples and forcing him to go back to his room, “Perhaps his father noted his good intentions, for he did not interfere except every now and then to help him in the maneuver from a distance with the point of the stick (…) One side of his body rose up, he was tilted at an angle in the doorway, his flank was quite bruised, horrid blotches stained the white door, soon he was stuck fast and, left to himself, could not have moved at ale his legs on one side fluttered trembling in the air, those on the other were crushed painfully to the floor-when from behind his father gave him a strong push which was literally a deliverance and he flew far into the room, bleeding freely.”

The next quote also represents how the alienation of the father with the work, makes him think that working could be more important than taking care for his own son, “Who could find the time, in this overworked and tired out family, to bother about Gregor more than was absolutely needful?” Everything seems to indicate in the story that as the characters enter in the world of the alienation of workers in a Capitalist system, they dehumanize and forget the important things that make them special.

Kafka had a specific mission with his story. He had no mercy with the bourgeoisie. With a petulant language, the manager appears during the first part, in Gregor’s house, just knowing that he has been absent. Even it is obvious that Gregor can be seriously ill, he releases the classic speech, with an educated appearance, that denotes falsehood and hypocrisy, about the unproductiveness of the absent worker, and that if he is still in the company it is because of the magnanimity of the boss. He does not hesitate to expose Gregor in front of his entire family if he manages to subject Gregor to his authority.

Although he tries to make us believe that he is an honest man who asks Gregor what is right, he does not stop showing himself without shame as the representative of a greedy bourgeoisie, who demands from his workers, the same functioning as a machine. For him, they are not more than other merchandise, “I hope it’s nothing serious. Although on the other hand, I must say that we men of business-fortunately or unfortunately-very often simply have to ignore any slight indisposition, since business must be attended to.”

The setting also has an important role. The dining room is the representation of bourgeoisie morality. This moral, place special emphasis on the image, the appearance. Although the family is affected by the drama of the metamorphosis of their son, in the dining room they try to pretend that they are a family like any other.

The mother is a weak woman, who suffers from respiratory problems and is easily impressionable; seeing his metamorphosed son, causes her to faint. She is the only person who cares for Gregor from the beginning. She is the one who notices in the first part that it is getting late and asks him constantly if he is okay. When the manager arrives, she tries to excuse her son, defending him against the accusations. In the same way, in the second part, she shows concern for Gregor and helps the daughter to prepare her son’s room.

While there, she is the only one who thinks about the humanity of her son; removing the furniture could be harmful to him. Perhaps the only thing that can be reproached is the fact that she didn’t defend his son in the third part when she had already begun to work. When Grete sentences that his brother must leave, she did not object.

The metamorphosis could be considered a metaphor of the fate that Kafka gave to the alienated workers; become dehumanized animals. A metamorphosis not only of Gregor but of his entire family, which goes from living in a bourgeois way to being part of the productive system with all that this implies for their lives and dreams. Therefore, the changes that occur in the family correspond more to the effects of work than to the tragedy of Gregor’s metamorphosis itself, without rejecting its importance as a trigger for change.