The Metamorphosis

I didn’t expect The Metamorphosis to be such an intriguing read. The first thing that bothered me was how Gregor was so, nonchalant about waking up one day realizing he’s turned into a bug!

Where previously Gregor’s body was yoked to commerce and provision for his family, now his insect body yokes itself to the family. When they realize that Gregor’s morphed into an insect, they are extremely quick to other him. Everything that is ‘human’ about Gregor is suddenly negated simply because his exterior form has changed. This really makes a point about how our bodies are pivotal in our interactions with people—that our bodies are not as innocent as they seem to be. By encasing ‘human consciousness’ in such a grotesque form, Kafka might be making a Faber point about us being “all the same under the skin”, yet that doesn’t matter as long as on the skin, you’re different. In other words, what’s inside is void, as long as what’s outside is alien.

Kafka writes with brilliant humor. However, here, unlike for Isserley, the body stands in the way of my sympathy for Gregor. No doubt on some level I do feel sorry for him, especially when he quietly dies alone and alienated, completely unhappy. But I think that by portraying Gregor’s insect body so grotesquely, Kafka takes pains to highlight the precise alienness of that insect body from us, the human body. All the crawling, the aporia, is so different from how the human body works. Whenever I am compelled to feel for and identify with Gregor, he starts crawling, or starts doing one of his ‘insect’ things that will remind me of his physical form. Somehow, reconciling the human consciousness within with the alien body without is just more difficult with Gregor than with Isserley.

Also, the insect body for me seems like a metaphor for the artist insofar as Kafka’s trying to say something about the artist being parasites and leeches of the society. When Gregor’s still in his human form, he was productive, useful, and contributive to his family and the economy, though he feels trapped and miserable. After gaining his insect body, he feels liberated from the verkher of the society but becomes a burden for the family. In his new insect, liberated body, Gregor is even able to protect his art. Here Kafka seems to suggest that the most conducive form for the artist is also the most vile and unproductive form for the society, or at least the people around him.