THOUGHTS ON BOOKS

This is a series of essays about books.

Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir) was first published in 1915.

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

Why represent a condition that is common to humans through an animal? The answer may lie in the magic of metaphor, in which Metamorphosis is a masterclass.

The life of Gregor Samsa is one of constriction within frameworks: parameters set by family circumstances beyond his control, suffocating responsibility, train timetables, cloth samples, parental debts, 4 o’clock alarms, the rhythm of his thankless job, the walls of his small room. Despite the fact that he travels for work, his life is devoid of mobility. It is no surprise that his only evening “amusement” is his “fretwork”, creating frames to contain images of life. When he transforms into an immobile, helpless multi-legged bug, his entrapment is literalised. If something manifestly absurd can be used as a representation of your daily life, perhaps there is something absurd about your daily life? The simple power of the metaphor to elucidate is extraordinary.

Much has already been said, I am sure, about the other metamorphoses that take place in the story, analogous to Gregor’s own, notably those of his father and sister. I will focus on the fact that within this network of metaphorical and comparative layers there lies, for me, a story in which the agility of the body is pitched against the mobility of the spirit and imagination. This is conveyed in the contrast between the striking opening paragraphs and final paragraphs, which give the story its wonderful shape.

What makes the first scene so delightful is its use of comical contrast. Gregor thinks his everyday thoughts, those of a man who doesn’t want to get out of bed to go to a soul-destroying job (all too relatable), mainly because he is not feeling “particularly fresh and active” – not because he is now a bug. At the start of the fourth paragraph, Kafka deftly draws us closer into Gregor’s mind. Whilst the entirety of the story in narrated in the third person, in this paragraph, he uses the thought as a springboard into first person, with the sentence, “oh god, he thought, what an exhausting job I’ve picked.” The “I” remains until the end of the next paragraph. It never comes back, but for a few paragraphs we feel as if we are in a first person narrative, which establishes something very important: Gregor is talking to us and we need to listen to his thoughts. This becomes urgently important, when, one paragraph later, it becomes clear that no one else can understand him. Our complicity with Gregor is sealed by this early intimacy.

The reader’s overwhelming impression of him, clearly since he cannot do very much with his body, is of an active mind at work, home to an innocence and a nobility of spirit. The reader baulks upon finding out that the shady pater familias has been exploiting his son for years, squirreling Gregor’s salary away into his private coffers, whilst the latter magnanimously “rejoiced at this evidence of unexpected thrift and foresight”. Most touching of all perhaps is his dream that his violin-playing sister should be sent to the Conservatorium, so she can dedicate herself to the pursuit of music. He retains this dream even when shunned by his family and sequestered in his room-cum-dustbin. Breaking free to come hear his sister play for the lodgers, he intends to “confide” in her this plan, imagining that “after this confession his sister would be so touched that she would burst into tears.” Evidently that does not happen – all hell breaks loose, and it is in fact in response to this interruption that sister Grete decides: “[T]hings can’t go on like this [...] we must try to get rid of it.” ( He is now, firmly, an “it”.) In the ensuing discussion we see the yawning chasm between Gregor and his family. His father notes, “half-questioningly” that “if he could understand us,” they could perhaps “come to an agreement,” to which Grete replies, “if this were Gregor he would have realised long ago that human beings can’t live with such a creature.” The blanket refusal to countenance the idea that he may still have a mind, that he could understand what they are saying, seems appalling and idiotic, but regrettably, quite normal for people who have no imagination.

Once Gregor is dead, the family get on with their business with a hypocrisy that is decidedly dastardly. We see them shed a few tears, take a day off work (something Gregor could have only dreamed of!), head out of the apartment for the first time in the story, and go on an empty, airy tram, to the countryside. Both parents, upon observing Grete’s “increasing vivacity” see that she “had bloomed into a pretty girl with a good figure” for whom a husband should be sought. The final, smug, line: “And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body,” brings the story to its dreadful conclusion. The emphasis on her agility offers stark contrast to Gregor’s immobility at the story’s beginning. Yet the reader cannot help but think their “dreams” for her are utterly impoverished when compared with Gregor’s. We cannot imagine a way in which Grete’s spirit will be mobilised by this new trajectory which will pinion her only more rigidly within the social framework, entrap down within another constrictive structure, even if it means she can literally move, from their old apartment to a new one, from the city out into the country, from her chair into the air. All of this bodily movement seems worthless in comparison with the leaps Gregor made with his imagination and his heart, so that the music which she played so “movingly” (telling choice of word) would triumph.

The distinction between Gregor’s imagination and the family’s lack thereof is particularly mordant here, but it is also visible in the difference between the metamorphoses, in terms of the aesthetic traditions to which they belong. The family’s metamorphoses are entirely realist; they undergo emotional and physical changes within the realm of everyday possibility. There is actually nothing of the metaphor in their transformation. Gregor’s metaphorical metamorphosis appears to be absurd, fantastical, but it also belongs to a classical tradition, the Ovidian tradition, where men’s transformations into beasts makes them into the stuff of myths. In this respect, though it is easy to see his experience as one of comical degradation, it is in fact is dignified by a narrative impulse two thousand years old, as well as being reinforced by the text’s own internal valorisation of expansive imagination over petty-minded practicality.

We might think of metaphor as transference, the transfer of meaning from one vessel to another, whilst metamorphosis is the transformation of the vessel itself. One final important metaphorical act is performed at the end of the text. It is a strange, voyeuristic feeling when the protagonist of a story dies and the reader remains present to observe the aftermath, as we do for several pages in this story. We feel slightly like interlopers, the person who invited us to this place, our own “intimate”, having disappeared. However, the contents of Gregor’s mind, now entirely forgotten by the family, has been transferred to us and remains only with us. It is of him we think as we watch the final scene unfold. The reader, who has access to all the information, to both Gregor’s innermost thoughts, and to the family’s actions once their son has departed, has nonetheless spent most of the story feeling very much like him: in our own metaphorical way, incapacitated. Our omniscience is of no purpose; we can do nothing to save him.