Gloria Baldacchini

Dentistry – 1st year

THE METAMORPHOSIS – KAFKA

Summary
The Metamorphosis a is short story written by Franz Kafka that narrates the unusual story
of Gregor Samsa, a salesman who woke up one day and found himself transformed in a huge
insect. As he is very hardworking and thinks about how essential his work is to sustain his
family, his first thought after realizing what he became was that he was not able to get to work.
At the same time, he always felt like his life was dictated by it and even admits to himself that he
would have already quitted his job if the decision only depended on him. His tardiness to work
raised his parents and sister’s suspicion that something was happening to Gregor but, ashamed,
he refused to let them in. It was only when his chief clerk came the Samsa’s house and menaced
him of losing his job that he finally accepted to open his door, even if this was not only ashaming
for him, but also very hard as he was not used to his new body. Seeing his horrendous
transformation, the chief clerk left the house as fast as he could, his mothers screamed horrified,
and his father pushed him back into his room, without caring that he even injured his son.
After this event, Gregor was forced to stay in his room, having only his sister Grete who
had the patience to enter to clean, bring him food that he liked (because his tasted changed with
his transformation), and rearrange the furniture to give him more space to crawl in, which made
him feel even more excluded than he already was. However, he still had to hide himself
whenever she came in. One day, Gregor tried to defend a painting that he wanted to keep by
hanging on top of it on the wall. When his mother saw him, she fainted and, panicking, he rushed
out of his room. His father, who just came back from the bank where he now worked to try to
compensate the loss of income that Gregor had caused by losing his job, got furious and started
throwing apples at him. One of them got painfully stuck onto his back, giving him a serious
wound that never got healed but always got worse, making him weaker day by day.
Subsequently to this accident, Gregor’s family started allowing him to keep his door
slightly open for a few hours in the evening to be able to listen to their conversations. He was
then able to also see with his own worsened sight that the mother and sister were consumed by
their overwork, and that, with the father, they started living a much cheaper life by reducing all
their possible expenses. They seemed miserable and the sister even stopped giving his insect
brother as much attention and care as before, blaming him for their poor situation. Gregor had at
the time completely lost appetite and stopped eating.
The privilege of seeing them ended as soon as the Samsa’s started to rent a room to three
male tenants, who were of course not aware of living right next to a gigantic insect. However,
one day, the new cleaning lady, intrigued by what she knew about Gregor, came into his room to
see him but forgot to properly close the door. At night, when he heard his sister playing the
violin for the three lodgers, he could not help himself from crawling out of his room and got
immediately caught by the tenants. They started complaining angrily to the mother and the father
and menaced to leave without paying their rent. This infuriated the Greta who started suggesting
to get rid of the giant insect, completely detaching “it” from her brother. Gregor, who heard the
entire conversation, managed to put together his last strength to drag himself back to his room,
where he was found dead the morning after by the cleaning lady. Since then, the parents and
Greta felt a huge relief and rapidly forgot about Gregor, whom they had not even took care of the
body themselves.

Analysis – Observe, Intuit, Reflect

In this absurd short story, Kafka used long and detailed descriptions to illustrate Gregor’s
transformation. By doing so, he concentrates much more on his feelings and mental evolution,
only giving few physical details which are mostly symbolic and that can all be interpreted in a
more meaningful way than just appearance. In fact, the reader does not actually know what
insect Gregor is specifically. He only knows that he has “numerous little legs” that he can’t
control at first, “antennas”, and a “brown belly slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff
sections”. However, Kafka insists so much about the giant vermin’s thoughts that the reader can
almost feel in the main character’s head.
This might be a technique that Kafka used to force the reader to see through Gregor’s appearance
and concentrate more about the meaning of his metamorphosis and its consequences. The few
physical characterizations we are given all insist on the fact that Gregor does not fit in his life
anymore, but was he actually fitting in before?
As he woke up in a new body, he started questioning why going to work and he realized that he
was doing it only for his family. With time passing with Gregor still being an insect and his
family neglecting him more and more, it is possible to see that the Samsa are incapable of
sacrificing as much as Gregor did for them. As a salesman, he could also rarely see his parents
and sister but after not being able to go to work, he was seeing them even less. This shows that
by inversing the situations (the family must provide for the house while Gregor is an actual
“parasite”), Gregor could feel that he had always been no more than a source of income for the
others, a utility without which he became no one. Therefore, his alienation was present even
before the transformation, it was just covered by his essentiality to the family.

2) A social domination dictated by money and appearance

From the beginning of the novella, Kafka shows how much appearance and financial stability
matter in society. Every single character got scared and repulsed by Gregor’s looks. This costed
him not only his job, but also his family and all his possessions. Also, when the father starts
working at the bank, he gets obsessed with his “smart blue uniform with gold button”, as seen by
Gregor, by always wearing it. He in fact seemed to use it as a proof of his dignity, that he felt to
have lost when his son turned into an insect. Mr. Samsa needed to always feel respected, and
therefore to always wear the uniform.
On the other hand, Kafka describes how this social domination is also consuming. By always
seeking for more money by over-working, Gregor witnesses his family deteriorating condition:
they look exhausted and miserable. Even the symbolic bank uniform becomes dirty and covered
by spots. Gregor, who is dominated by the social pressure over his appearances, looses his life
for how exhausting and self-destructing this pressure was.
Considering this, is the author considering that the real punition for Gregor is his prejudiced and
conditioned family rather than his transformation in huge insect which actually helped him
escape from his job?
This would be demonstrated by Gregor’s death. In fact, he dies after he last tried to feel part of
his family, which he attempted by sneaking out of his room to listen to his sister playing the
violin, which caused troubles to his family. Gregor died in isolation without even trying to
survive, seeing that all he was doing was causing agitation and disturbance. He was exhausted
and was not even nourishing himself anymore, as if he wanted to put an end to his life. The few
positive feelings about his family accepting him he had when he first turned into an insect were
totally lost.

3) Grete
Grete Samsa is Gregor’s little sister. When his bother’s transformation occurred, she was the
only one taking care of him and being hopeful for his eventual return to human appearance. She
even seems to understand him, or at least she does her best to interpret his behavior. In fact,
when she first brought him his favorite food and saw that he did not even touch it, she
immediately figured out that his metamorphosis affected his taste too. To content him, she then
fetched many different foods for him to see what his new appetences were. Also, seeing that he
liked to crawl in his room, she did her best to move out the furniture to give him more space. By
doing so, she was making Gregor feel less alienated and more taken cared of, a feeling that he
needed and that his parents never gave him since he transformed.
However, Grete did not pursue this condescending behavior for long. In fact, after a while, she
started to take less and less care of his brother, only bringing him the minimum food to survive.
Her initial support and kindness disappeared; she was then only fulfilling a duty rather than
helping her brother. She seemed to have lost hope in Gregor’s recovery and to even feel irritated
by the disturbance he causes to his family. By the end of the short story, she is the one
suggesting to “get rid of it”, completely dehumanizing her brother by referring him with an
unpersonal pronoun.
Grete’s evolution throughout the story could be analyzed as the maturation of a girl turning into a
woman. Her detachment to Gregor shows how she starts to care about more adult affairs. In fact,
she starts working to provide financial support to her family, probably making her more and
more aware about how disturbing and troublesome having an insect in the family is.
Here, Kafka seems to underline that in this oppressed society only children are capable of real
attachment to others for the better and the worse. Once people grow, the only thing that actually
matter are money and appearances, which completely outweigh the needs of a ill and insect-
looking family member.