Beating an Incredibly Dead Horse a Little More

The reader who struggles with the text of The Metamorphosis soon realizes that achieving an empathic stance toward Gregor--or his family--is not easy. At first, the reader might feel sorry for Gregor, just as one feels sorry for any victim of a catastrophe. But sympathy is not empathy. His metamorphosis into a bug, and a debilitated one at that, captures his essential characteristics that existed before the metamorphosis: annoying, loathsome, brittle, and easily crushed. "The Metamorphosis" can be seen as a reaction against bourgeois society and its demands. Gregor's manifest physical separation may represent his alienation and inarticulate yearnings. He had been a "vermin," crushed and circumscribed by authority and routine. He had been imprisoned by social and economic demands: "Just don't stay in bed being useless . . . . " After all, Kafkaesque defines us. It's the one word that tells us what we are, what we can expect, how the world works. And to find out what that means, you read Kafka. You read 'The Metamorphosis,' which is about a man who wakes up as a big bug, and then you know. Kafka’s tales are also described by the term ‘uncanny,’ which, strictly defined, applies to literature that deals with themes beyond knowledge, thus beyond rational explanation, as many events in his stories surely are. You see Gregor's life story and personal identity change dramatically when he becomes a vermin. After the introduction, readers are left wondering if Gregor really did awake, or if he is indeed sleeping, still caught in some horrific hallucination. As a character that induces both disgust and empathy, Gregor might be considered a grotesque. Lastly, the translator and reader must grapple with the story's first sentence -- the sentence that announces, without apparent surprise, that Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find he'd become an insect.