Metamorphisis

4 Pages 1020 Words

Figurative versus Literal: a Discussion of Metamorphosis


Can anyone wake up one morning, and like Kafka’s character Gregor Samsa, turn into an insect? Not without upsetting several natural laws of nature. Great literature, being defined as works that have withstood the test of time, is fraught with allegories and subtle implications, which are meant to provoke thought in the reader. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the reader watches a transformation of the main character from a man into a cockroach and his family’s reaction to it. The meaning, however, stretches beyond just the scientific impossibility of a human transforming into an insect and envelopes a criticism of societal views of the workingman and his view of himself.
Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a classic tale embodying the existentialist condition. The reader is only given a mere glimpse into the life of the main character, Gregor Samsa, before he undergoes this drastic change. The reader learns that Gregor had been working as something of a traveling salesman since the demise of his father’s company some year before. Gregor became the breadwinner of the family; his mother was too ill with asthma and his sister was too young to work. The character feels obligation to keep his family living in the life that they are accustomed to with a servant and cook, however, there is some disdain that he feels for the life which he leading, “…the plague of traveling: the anxieties of changing trains, the irregular, inferior meals, the ever changing faces, never to be seen again, people with whom one has no chance to be friendly” (Kafka).
As Gregor changes first outwardly then inward, his family retreats further and further away. Grete, the younger sister, at first brings her brother food to suit his insect appetite when he can no longer stand to eat normal fresh food. As time progresses, she stops cleaning his room and defending him At the end of the novella, Grete...