ŷ������

*edited on 26.04.2024 after reading and in response to Father's Last Escape by Bruno Schulz

The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka


The Metamorphosis can quite easily be one of Franz Kafka’s best works of literature- one of the best in Existentialist literature. Franz Kafka has been one of my all time favorite authors, he quite effortlessly shows the struggle of human existence- the problem of living in modern society- through the narrator, the world of Kafka is surreal having tinge of fantsay but still a perfect mirror to our real world.


One fine morning, Gregor Samsa wakes in his bed and finds himself metamorphosized into an a mammoth bug- the vermin; as expected, he struggles to comprehend what realily has transpired, for the reality may be stranger than fiction but what has happened is out of proportions, he checks out his little room and though everything looks ordinary to him anyway it gets a peculiar inclination it may not be so. He attempts to turn over and return to stay in bed so that he may do away with the unease of his newly found existence, requests to disregard what has occurred, but the state of strange and recently transformed back limits his mobility to just side to side, as if his degrees of movements have been limited in sync with his existence.

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."


Franz Kafka has a panache to throw the reader off guard, starightaway, through the very direct manner in which the initial lines of the novella relates the odd occasion of Gregor's transformation, the author raises the normal circumstances to abnormal levels to give it a tinge of surrealism and infuses it with commonality of the life to make a preposterous world which is crisp, disorganized as opposed to rational and normal, as we expect it to be; but the Kafka always do what you least expect.

The protagonist of the story, Gregor Samsa agonizingly becomes accustomed to his creepy vermin body and his family takes care of him (mostly an inappropriate things, however they couldn't care less) and expels furniture from his room with the goal that he can uninhibitedly move around and climb the walls. Be that as it may, they would prefer not to see his appalling structure, he is kept to his room, and normally stows away under the couch when his sister enters with his food, to save her sensibilities (as opposed to the pleasantly human creepy crawly Gregor, his sister isn't chivalrous in any way, yet progressively hostile and barbarous); his brutish dad (as Kafka himself had been quite afraid of his father) pursues him back by tossing apples at him when he once comes out. The relatives additionally need to take employments for they can no longer soak up the fruitful child. What's more, the circumstance separates, and the family crumbles.


The problem of alienation is explored to depth in the novella- Gregor become insect and behaviour of his family members change towards him, he may transformed to something unusual at the core he is still the same however he faces problem of acceptance by society due to his transformed appearance, which ridicules his being- his existence- as if he is thrown into the hell of nothingness without any notice. The feebleness of his existence disintegrates his being into nothingness, under the sheer pressure of the society- the 'Other'.

The novella raises some very basic and profound questions of human existence- alienation, identity, being. Kafka questions all our presuppositions of life- success, social position, money, that a healthy life is characterized by a steadily improving standard of living and a socially-acceptable appearance which we think matter most- through Gregor's metamorphosis. These presuppositions of our life pose more serious questions- which are very chilly and which can rip us apart from any sense of our (inauthentic) existence.

The author robs Gregor-the protagonist- of every sense of his inauthentic existence by stealing off all assumptions of his life, now he is striped down to the very core of his existence. The protagonist is encountered with basic problems of human existence- what it takes to be?- which we encounter in our lives- if we once appeared socially acceptable and now have ceased to do so, are we still in fact ourselves? Was the socially-acceptable persona in fact ourselves, or is there more essential self-ness in the being we have now become? Or have we, in fact, been nobody in the first place, and are we nobody still?


Gregor Samsa perhpas makes us to look in to our own abyss, to ponder our own character perhaps showing the horror of our lives, about the fluidity of what we take in our lives as fixed and steady. The Metamorphosis makes us question our identity, our very existence- what it takes to be human, about how we try to behave in an manner pleasing to others, perhpas underlining the bad faith of Sartre. The distrubing aspect of the story is the manner in which Gregor Samsa surrenders himself to the fivolity of his family members, the manner in which he is stripped off the exisetnce he has carved for himself is rather unsettling and speaks about irrationality of life, the horrors and dangers of our own metamorphosis. Kafka gives us that how the conventions of normal society are twisted because of our incompetence to look past the surface to the individual inside.