Austrian author Franz Kafka, in a few short weeks with Wittgensteinian compositional labor, penned what many consider to be one of the greatest works of 20th century literature, The Metamorphosis. More fascinating perhaps, and in many respects as ironical as the figure who created the work, the novella’s first line is frequently cited as the greatest of the century–the paradox being that, largely due to German syntax and the problem of semantic equivalency, there is no consensus upon the English translation of the charter sentence. The anxiety-driven writer who was painfully aware of the existential ironies of life would no doubt have spent equal measures reveling in such a fact as he would vex over his lost or misconstrued meaning.
The novella’s premise is simply stated in the text’s opening line: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”1 The writer assures us in the next paragraph that “It was no dream” (later seconded when vermin-Gregor wakes from a dream, thus validating the authenticity of what has occurred via the logistics of dream logic). Thus begins one of the greatest nightmares ever set to page as one man is irreconcilably confronted by despair, isolation, alienation, and ostracization.
Disrupting the Aristotelian maxim that there be explication prior to denouncement, after beginning without explanation (much like Joseph K.’s plight in The Trial) or seeming concern for Samsa’s absurdly abrupt physical conversion, we follow Gregor as his family learns and attempts to reconcile and adapt to his, as well as their own, newfound circumstance. However, in a work composed during the offset of the first World War and appearing shortly after its commencement, the Jewish writer’s tale is stunningly devoid of any hint of love, compassion, or faith as the remaining members of the Samsa household begrudgingly transform into socially respectable individuals as they assume meaningful roles for the first time in their lives while nevertheless refusing to acknowledge the value of such. Masterfully, by the close of the text, Kafka departs on the insinuation that the family will be inevitably doomed to repeat the same in respect to Grete, Gregor’s burgeoning younger sister.
Gregor’s dilemma encompasses–not only the universal sentiment during the time–but stands as commentary upon the human predicament as a whole. The crux of the Gregor’s tragedy is not that he has been inexplicably changed literally overnight, but that he continues to yearn for affection and respect. “Samsa” is not only a cryptogram for “Kafka” (we find many stunning literal, as well as metaphorical, biographical similarities with Gregor and his author), but the surname is a phonetic contraction of the Czech “sam,” meaning “alone,” and “jsem,” loosely translated as “I am.” Hence, it is in the character’s inherent nature and linage that he finds himself longing for help but, alas, though dreadfully indisposed, shortly after Gregor has discovered his change, his mind nevertheless becomes preoccupied with how he will get to work for he is the sole provider of a debt-laden family after his father, five years prior, lost the family business. As such, Kafka cleverly has his character bear the burden of the Sins of His (Tyrannical) Father(s) before, and in what is by far one of the eeriest metaphorical crucifixions ever to grace the written page, we find the hideous vermin inadvertently fleeing for safety once the sanctity of his bedroom is breeched as he is left “clinging to slats with his little legs” (which is succinctly paralleled by the note that one of his flanks is scraped, he is bleeding profusely, and that his hobby is woodworking).
Even though the triptych format of the text is complimented by repletion of the trinity throughout (Gregor has three family members, the Samsas board a trio of lodgers, and the household employs three different housekeepers during the narrative) and Gregor’s father repels his estranged son by pummeling him with Biblical sin–apples–Kafka never deludes his audience. Shortly before “The War to End All Wars,” whereby men would kill one other en masse for undisclosed or frivolous reasons, the author never provides one instance in which hope is to be implied as a redemptive possibility as the symbol of power in the text, a newspaper, is almost steadfastly retained by everyone except the one individual who needs it most.
It is with this, months after Gregor’s unfortunate epiphany of what he has become, that we are left harrowingly alone with what the family comes to refer to in the depreciating third person singular. Amid a barren bedroom, deprived of any semblance of a human occupant, that has long since been converted into a storeroom, the only individual whom we encounter is a maid whose been relegated sole responsibility for Gregor, a son and brother who was not only unapologetically taken for granted, but never once evidenced cause for his plight. Sorrowfully, Kafka has the character nevertheless persist in his longing for a girl in a picture hanging from the wall, an individual whom he never knew but nonetheless symbolically loved, as her two-dimensional presence is the only remnant of humanity left to what has, as a consequence, all but become a creature.
In much the same manner as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, with sustained readings based on such diverse themes as isolation, Existentialism, father-son relations, Marxism, Freudianism, economics, Judaism, the author’s life and illness, Jungian Archetypes, fascism, birth order, familial stratums, feminism, irony, among seemingly countless others (Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold estimates the number ranges around 130), Franz Kafka’s bleak vision of humanity is an unflinching look into what is means to be human. Unfortunately, not all will readily concur with the author’s theories but, regardless, such individuals will indubitably be unable to rid themselves of The Metamorphosis for, as Flannery O’Connor proclaimed of John Hawkes’s The Lime Twig, the work is to be “suffered like a dream.” However, in much the same manner as the author viewed life itself, the dream is a literal nightmare which must nonetheless be persevered until the welcome reprieve called death.
-Egregious Gurnow
1 Some have translated the passage as Gregor waking to find himself transformed into a cockroach, bug, insect, or beetle and, indeed, the third maid refers to Gregor as an “old dung beetle” but, of course, this is a purely subjective label by an uneducated, ergo unreliable, character. Furthermore, Kafka adamantly instructed his publisher not to visually depict the character on the cover of the text, “even in the distance.” The only empirical evidence of what Gregor is is sporadically provided in isolated, minute, and disassociated details, atop the citation that, when attempting to unlock his bedroom door, his mouth is nearly level with the keyhole.
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