59 pages • 1 hour read
Franz KafkaThe Metamorphosis
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1915A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Effects of Social Alienation
Gregor feels that as a travelling salesman, the "stresses of selling are much greater than the work going on at head office" (3), including problems with travel, poor diet, and "constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart" (4). By keeping him on the road constantly, Gregor's job alienates him from his family and any potential friends he could make. Even within his family, Gregor's family sees him primarily as a dutiful worker. They don't seem to consider how his job affects him, and they seem to take for granted his ability to support them. The nature of his job and his family's lack of regard for Gregor's basic humanity alienate Gregor from other humans even while he's in human form.
In having Gregor transform from a human to a vermin-like creature, Kafka makes Gregor's figurative alienation literal. Gregor's speech becomes accompanied by "an irrepressibly painful squeaking" (5) that prevents anyone from understanding him. However, it seems that even when he was human, Gregor had difficulty with communicating his true thoughts and feelings. After seeing him for the first time, Gregor's family immediately locks him in his room. Only Grete will come in, and only if Gregor hides himself.
Gregor's alienation from humanity continues its breakdown in the novella's last two sections. At first, removing the furniture from his room excites Gregor. After hearing his mother argue that keeping the furniture in place will help Gregor "forget the intervening time all the more easily" (28), Gregor changes his mind. He realizes that "the lack of all immediate human contact" (28) has "confused his understanding" (28) so that he's prioritized what would be good for him as a bug over what would be good for him as a human. Grete's violin-playing compels Gregor to abandon caution and move towards his family. He asks himself if he is "an animal if music could captivate him so" (41). When, finally, Grete encourages her family to regard Gregor not as their son or brother, but as a "monster" (43), Gregor slinks to his room and dies.
Work as a Dehumanizing Force
Neither Gregor's family nor his employers seem to regard him as a human. Rather, they regard him solely as a source of income. On a figurative level, Kafka's choice to portray Gregor as "vermin" (3), rather than a less-upsetting creature, shows how working a mundane, though stressful job might reduce a human being to their basest level. As Gregor says, "People don't like travelling salesmen" (14), nor do most like vermin. Rather, they depend on him strictly for his productive abilities. When Gregor's absence prompts the manager to visit Gregor's home, Gregor wonders whether the company considers all of their workers, collectively, "scoundrels" (8). The manager puts pressure on Gregor to prove he's unfit to work with no respect for his privacy, telling the Samsas that workers "very often simply have to overcome a slight indisposition for business reasons" (9). Gregor's family's disgusted treatment of Gregor echoes this lack of regard.
While Kafka never gives an explicit cause for Gregor's transformation, he does show how working takes other tolls on Gregor and his family. The tolls affect not only the body, but through exhaustion and time consumption, limit time for the self and leisure. As a travelling salesman, Gregor explains that when he returns from a long stretch on the road, he can "feel in his own body the nasty consequences" (14) of living in hotels, eating bad food, and getting poor sleep. He's never made friends. Gregor's only diversion is "fretwork" (9); his only possession a frame which he's crafted. When Gregor's family must begin working to replace Gregor's income, they all face changes to their lives. Mr. Samsa returns home from work exhausted, falling "asleep quickly in his arm chair" (34) just after dinner and remaining there until much prying and prodding from his wife and daughter. Mrs. Samsa, an asthmatic "for whom wandering through the apartment even now was a great strain" (24), takes up a job sewing lingerie, often continuing to work late into the night. Grete, who works as a salesclerk, comes home to study stenography and French to perhaps improve her employment. The family's dedication to working just to survive reduces them to little more than anonymous laborers, alienated from themselves
Family Duty and Guilt
In attempting to come to terms with Gregor's new form, Kafka writes that "a requirement of family duty to suppress one's aversion and to endure—nothing else, just endure" (34). Forced into becoming the sole provider for his family, Gregor has endured for five long years working a job that he hates. When Gregor awakens to find himself transformed into an insect-like creature, he's less concerned with his new body than with sleeping through his alarm and missing his train to work. Even in the earliest moments of his transformation, Gregor feels a sense of duty to them, reassuring himself that even though he can't get out of bed to work, he isn't "thinking at all about abandoning his family" (9).
Gregor preserves this sense of duty throughout the novella, although it quickly gives way to feelings of guilt. After his family's initial shock and horror at seeing Gregor's new body, Gregor wonders whether "all tranquility, all prosperity, all contentment should come to a horrible end" (19) due to his transformation. Gregor tries to push this thought out of his mind, but he never quite succeeds. Despite the potential horror of waking up as an insect, Gregor's guilt preserves in him "the greatest consideration for his family to tolerate the troubles which in his present condition he was now forced to cause them" (19). Gregor's attempts to spare his sister and mother the horror of seeing him tend not to make a difference in their treatment of him. When, by the novella's end, Gregor witnesses how his appearance in the living room affects his family—forcing their lodgers to move out and Grete to push for getting "rid of it" (43)—Gregor retires to his dark bedroom and succumbs to guilt-induced starvation.
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By Franz Kafka
