The
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Plot Overview
Gregor
Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up in his bed to find himself transformed
into a large insect. He looks around his room, which appears normal, and
decides to go back to sleep to forget about what has happened. He attempts to
roll over, only to discover that he cannot due to his new body—he is stuck on
his hard, convex back. He tries to scratch an itch on his stomach, but when he
touches himself with one of his many new legs, he is disgusted. He reflects on
how dreary life as a traveling salesman is and how he would quit if his parents
and sister did not depend so much on his income. He turns to the clock and sees
that he has overslept and missed his train to work.
Gregor’s
mother knocks on the door, and when he answers her, Gregor finds that his voice
has changed. His family suspects that he may be ill, so they ask him to open
the door, which he keeps locked out of habit. He tries to get out of bed, but
he cannot maneuver his transformed body. While struggling to move, he hears his
office manager come into the family’s apartment to find out why Gregor has not
shown up to work. He eventually rocks himself to the floor and calls out that
he will open the door momentarily.
Through
the door, the office manager warns Gregor of the consequences of missing work
and hints that Gregor’s recent work has not been satisfactory. Gregor protests
and tells the office manager that he will be there shortly. Neither his family
nor the office manager can understand what Gregor says, and they suspect that
something may be seriously wrong with him. Gregor manages to unlock and open
the door with his mouth, since he has no hands. He begs the office manager’s
forgiveness for his late start. Horrified by Gregor’s appearance, the office
manager bolts from the apartment. Gregor tries to catch up with the fleeing
office manager, but his father drives him back into the bedroom with a cane and
a rolled newspaper. Gregor injures himself squeezing back through the doorway,
and his father slams the door shut. Gregor, exhausted, falls asleep.
Gregor
wakes and sees that someone has put milk and bread in his room. Initially
excited, he quickly discovers that he has no taste for milk, once one of his
favorite foods. He settles himself under a couch and listens to the quiet
apartment. The next morning, his sister Grete comes in, sees that he has not
touched the milk, and replaces it with rotting food scraps, which Gregor
happily eats. This begins a routine in which his sister feeds him and cleans up
while he hides under the couch, afraid that his appearance will frighten her.
Gregor spends his time listening through the wall to his family members
talking. They often discuss the difficult financial situation they find
themselves in now that Gregor can’t provide for them. Gregor also learns that
his mother wants to visit him, but his sister and father will not let her.
Gregor
grows more comfortable with his changed body. He begins climbing the walls and
ceiling for amusement. Discovering Gregor’s new pastime, Grete decides to
remove some of the furniture to give Gregor more space. She and her mother
begin taking furniture away, but Gregor finds their actions deeply distressing.
He tries to save a picture on the wall of a woman wearing a fur hat, fur scarf,
and a fur muff. Gregor’s mother sees him hanging on the wall and passes out.
Grete calls out to Gregor—the first time anyone has spoken directly to him
since his transformation. Gregor runs out of the room and into the kitchen. His
father returns from his new job, and misunderstanding the situation, believes
Gregor has tried to attack the mother. The father throws apples at Gregor, and
one sinks into his back and remains lodged there. Gregor manages to get back
into his bedroom but is severely injured.
Gregor’s
family begins leaving the bedroom door open for a few hours each evening so he
can watch them. He sees his family wearing down as a result of his
transformation and their new poverty. Even Grete seems to resent Gregor now,
feeding him and cleaning up with a minimum of effort. The family replaces their
maid with a cheap cleaning lady who tolerates Gregor’s appearance and speaks to
him occasionally. They also take on three boarders, requiring them to move
excess furniture into Gregor’s room, which distresses Gregor. Gregor has also
lost his taste for the food Grete brings and he almost entirely ceases eating.
One
evening, the cleaning lady leaves Gregor’s door open while the boarders lounge
about the living room. Grete has been asked to play the violin for them, and
Gregor creeps out of his bedroom to listen. The boarders, who initially seemed
interested in Grete, grow bored with her performance, but Gregor is transfixed
by it. One of the boarders spots Gregor and they become alarmed. Gregor’s father
tries to shove the boarders back into their rooms, but the three men protest
and announce that they will move out immediately without paying rent because of
the disgusting conditions in the apartment.
Grete
tells her parents that they must get rid of Gregor or they will all be ruined.
Her father agrees, wishing Gregor could understand them and would leave of his
own accord. Gregor does in fact understand and slowly moves back to the
bedroom. There, determined to rid his family of his presence, Gregor dies.
Upon
discovering that Gregor is dead, the family feels a great sense of relief. The
father kicks out the boarders and decides to fire the cleaning lady, who has
disposed of Gregor’s body. The family takes a trolley ride out to the
countryside, during which they consider their finances. Months of spare living
as a result of Gregor’s condition have left them with substantial savings. They
decide to move to a better apartment. Grete appears to have her strength and
beauty back, which leads her parents to think about finding her a husband.
Character List
·
Gregor
Samsa
A traveling salesman and the protagonist of the story.
Gregor hates his job but keeps it because of the obligations he feels to pay
off his father’s debt and care for his family. He has transformed into a large
bug and spends the rest of his life in that state. Although hideous and
unrecognizable to others, Gregor retains his some of his inner life and struggles
to reconcile his lingering humanity with his physical condition.
·
Grete
Samsa
Gregor’s sister. Grete is a young woman on the cusp of
adulthood. She initially shows great concern for Gregor, but her compassion
gives way to possessiveness and resentment as the effects of Gregor’s
transformation on her life slowly take their toll.
·
The
father
Gregor’s father. The failure of his business has left him
exhausted and emotionally broken, and he is forced to return to work again
after Gregor’s metamorphosis. Despite the beneficial effects his new employment
has on him, he expresses considerable hostility toward Gregor.
·
The
mother
Gregor’s mother. Frail and distressed, the mother is torn
between her love for Gregor and her horror at Gregor’s new state. Grete and
Gregor’s father seek to protect her from the full reality of her son’s
transformation.
·
The
charwoman
An elderly widow and the Samsa family’s cleaning lady.
Taken on by the Samsas after their regular maid quits because of Gregor, she is
a blunt, honest woman who faces the reality of Gregor’s state without fear or
disgust.
·
The
office manager
Gregor’s boss. Distrustful and overbearing, the office
manager insinuates that Gregor has been doing a poor job at work. He flees in
terror upon seeing Gregor.
·
The
boarders
Three temporary boarders in the Samsas’ house. The
boarders greatly value order and cleanliness, and thus become horrified when
they discover Gregor.
·
The
maid
The Samsas’ original maid. She is terrified by Gregor and
begs the family to fire her.
In depth
Analysis
Gregor Samsa
Characters Gregor Samsa
Despite his complete
physical transformation into an insect at the beginning of the story, Gregor
changes very little as a character over the course of The Metamorphosis.
Most notably, both as a man and as an insect Gregor patiently accepts the
hardships he faces without complaint. When his father’s business failed, he
readily accepted his new role as the money-earner in the family without
question, even though it meant taking a job he disliked as a traveling
salesman. Similarly, when he first realizes he has transformed into an insect,
he does not bemoan his condition, wonder about its cause, or attempt to rectify
it in any way. On the contrary, he quickly accepts that he has become a bug and
tries to go about his life as best he can in his new condition. The narration
in the story mirrors Gregor’s calm forbearance by never questioning or
explaining how or why this odd transformation occurred or remarking on its
strangeness. Instead, the story, much like Gregor, moves on quickly from the
metamorphosis itself and focuses on the consequences of Gregor’s change. For
Gregor, that primarily means becoming accustomed to his new body.
In fact
reconciling his human thoughts and feelings with his new, insect body is the
chief conflict Gregor faces in the story. Despite having changed into an
insect, Gregor initially still wants to go to work so that he can provide for
his family. It takes him time to realize that he can no longer play that role
in his family and that he can’t even go outside in his current state. As the
story continues, Gregor’s insect body has an increasing influence on his
psychology. He finds that he is at ease hiding in the dark under the sofa in
his room, like a bug would, even though his body won’t fit comfortably. He also
discovers that he enjoys crawling on the walls and ceiling. But Gregor’s
humanity never disappears entirely. He still feels human emotions and has
strong memories of his human life. As a result, even though he knows he would
feel more physically comfortable if his room were emptied of furniture,
allowing him to crawl anywhere he pleased, Gregor panics when Grete and his
mother are taking out the furniture, such as the writing desk he remembers
doing all his assignments at as a boy. In a desperate attempt to hold onto the
few reminders he has of his humanity, he clings to the picture of the woman
muffled in fur so that no one will take it away. Ultimately he’s unable to
fully adapt to his new body or to find a new role within his family, which is
disgusted by him and ashamed of his presence in the house. Toward the end of
the story, he even feels haunted by the thought that he might be able to take
control of the family’s affairs again and resume his role as the family’s money-earner.
Despite these hopes, he decides it would be best for the family if he were to
disappear entirely, and so he dies much as he lived: accepting his fate without
complaint and thinking of his family’s best interests.
Grete Samsa
Characters Grete Samsa
Apart from her brother Gregor, Grete is the only other character
addressed by name in the story, a distinction that reflects her relative
importance. Grete is also the only character to show pity for Gregor through
most of the novella (his mother also exhibits pity for him later in the story),
apparently owing to the great affection Grete and Gregor had for each other
before Gregor’s transformation. Consequently, she becomes Gregor’s primary
caretaker. She brings him food, cleans his room, places his chair by the window
so he can see out to the street, and comes up with the idea of removing his
furniture so he has more room to scurry and climb. In this role as caretaker
she serves as Gregor’s only real human contact for most of the story, and she
acts as Gregor’s only strong emotional tie to his family—and indeed to the rest
of humanity.
Grete,
however, changes more than any other character in the story—in essence
undergoing her own metamorphosis from a girl into a woman—and that change
occurs while her pity for Gregor slowly diminishes. While at first Grete takes
care of her brother out of kindness, eventually she comes to regard the job as
a duty. She doesn’t always enjoy it, but it serves to define her position in
the family, and she becomes territorial about caring for Gregor, not wanting
her mother to be involved. As she matures and takes on more adult
responsibilities, most notably getting a job to help provide for her family
financially, her commitment to Gregor diminishes. Eventually she comes to resent
the role, and it is Grete who decides they must get rid of Gregor. The story
ends with the parents recognizing that Grete has become a pretty young woman
and thinking that it may be time to find her a husband, suggesting Grete has
completed her own transformation into an adult.
The father
Characters The father
The reader predominantly sees Gregor’s father from Gregor’s
point of view in the story, and for the most part, he appears as a hopeless and
unkind man, concerned primarily with money, who isn’t particularly close to his
son. We learn, for example, that he had a business that failed, and since its
failure he has lost his motivation and essentially given up working, forcing
Gregor to provide for the family and work to pay off the father’s debts. Yet
despite Gregor’s help, the father has no sympathy for Gregor after Gregor
undergoes his metamorphosis. On the day of Gregor’s change, the father only
seems concerned about the family’s finances, and in the two instances when he
interacts directly with Gregor in the story, he attacks Gregor in some way,
first when he beats Gregor back into his room at the beginning and later when
he throws the fruit at him.
These
details suggest an estrangement between Gregor and his father (Kafka’s strained
relationship with his own father, whom he viewed as alien and overbearing,
certainly gives weight to such an interpretation). Gregor never explicitly says
he resents his father, but it’s clear that he only works as a traveling
salesman to make up for his father’s failure in business, suggesting he feels
trapped by his father’s failings. Moreover, Gregor never displays the same
affection for his father that he displays, albeit rarely, toward his mother and
sister, as when he longs to see his mother before she and Grete begin moving
the furniture out of his room. Adding to this sense of estrangement is the way
the father is referred to in the story. The narrator does not name him beyond
calling him “Mr. Samsa,” and in Gregor’s thoughts he almost always appears as
“the father.”
Themes
The Absurdity of Life
Beginning with its first sentence, The Metamorphosis deals
with an absurd, or wildly irrational, event, which in itself suggests that the
story operates in a random, chaotic universe. The absurd event is Gregor’s
waking up to discover he has turned into a giant insect, and since it’s so far
beyond the boundaries of a natural occurrence—it’s not just unlikely to happen,
it’s physically impossible—Gregor’s metamorphosis takes on a supernatural
significance. Also notable is the fact that the story never explains Gregor’s
transformation. It never implies, for instance, that Gregor’s change is the
result of any particular cause, such as punishment for some misbehavior. On the
contrary, by all evidence Gregor has been a good son and brother, taking a job
he dislikes so that he can provide for them and planning to pay for his sister
to study music at the conservatory. There is no indication that Gregor deserves
his fate. Rather, the story and all the members of the Samsa family treat the
event as a random occurrence, like catching an illness. All these elements
together give the story a distinct overtone of absurdity and suggest a universe
that functions without any governing system of order and justice.
The
responses of the various characters add to this sense of absurdity,
specifically because they seem almost as absurd as Gregor’s transformation
itself. The characters are unusually calm and unquestioning, and most don’t act
particularly surprised by the event. (The notable exception is the Samsas’
first maid, who begs to be fired.) Even Gregor panics only at the thought of
getting in trouble at work, not at the realization that he is physically altered,
and he makes no efforts to determine what caused the change or how to fix it.
He worries instead about commonplace problems, like what makes him feel
physically comfortable. In fact, the other characters in the story generally
treat the metamorphosis as something unusual and disgusting, but not
exceptionally horrifying or impossible, and they mostly focusing on adapting to
it rather than fleeing from Gregor or trying to cure him. Gregor’s family, for
example, doesn’t seek out any help or advice, and they appear to feel more
ashamed and disgusted than shocked. Their second maid also shows no surprise
when she discovers Gregor, and when the boarders staying with the family see
Gregor they are mostly upset that Gregor is unclean and disturbs the sense of
order they desire in the house. These unusual reactions contribute to the
absurdity of the story, but they also imply that the characters to some degree
expect, or at least are not surprised by, absurdity in their world.
The Disconnect Between Mind and Body
Gregor’s
transformation completely alters his outward appearance, but it leaves his mind
unchanged, creating a discord, or lack of harmony, between his mind and body.
When he first gets out of his bed after waking, for instance, he tries to stand
upright, even though his body is not suited to being upright. He also thinks of
going to work, despite the fact that he can’t by any means do so, and when
Grete leaves him the milk at the beginning of Part 2, he is surprised to find
he doesn’t like it, even though milk was a favorite drink when he was human. In
essence, he continues to think with a human mind, but because his body is no
longer human, he is unable at first to reconcile these two parts of himself.
As Gregor
becomes accustomed to his new body, his mind begins to change in accordance
with his physical needs and desires. Yet he’s never able to fully bring his
mind and body into harmony. Gregor gradually behaves more and more like an
insect, not only craving different foods than he did when he was human, but
also beginning to prefer tight, dark spaces, like the area under his sofa, and
enjoying crawling on the walls and ceiling. (Through these details, the story
suggests that our physical lives shape and direct our mental lives, not the
other way around.) But Gregor’s humanity never disappears entirely, and he
feels conflicted as a result. This conflict reaches its climax when Grete and
the mother move the furniture out of Gregor’s room. Gregor initially approves
of the idea because it will make his room more comfortable for him physically.
Without furniture, he’ll be able to crawl anywhere he pleases. But realizing
that his possessions, which represent to him his former life as a human,
provide him emotional comfort, he suddenly faces a choice: he can be physically
comfortable or emotionally comfortable, but not both. In other words, his mind
and body remain opposed to one another. Gregor, unable to relinquish his
humanity, chooses emotional comfort, leading him to desperately cling to the
picture of the woman in furs.
The Limits of Sympathy
After
Gregor’s metamorphosis, his family members struggle with feelings of both
sympathy and revulsion toward him. Grete and the mother in particular feel a
great deal of sympathy for Gregor after his change, apparently because they
suspect some aspect of his humanity remains despite his appearance. This
sympathy leads Grete initially to take on the role of Gregor’s caretaker—she
even goes so far as to try to discover what food he likes after his change—and
it leads the mother to fight with Grete over moving the furniture out of
Gregor’s room since she holds out hope that he will return to his human form.
Even the father, who shows the least sympathy of the family members toward
Gregor and even attacks him twice, never suggests that they kill him or force
him out of the house. Instead, he implicitly shows compassion for Gregor by
allowing the family to care for him.
Eventually,
however, the stresses caused by Gregor’s presence wear down the family members’
sympathy, and even the most caring of them find that their sympathy has a
limit. One of those sources of stress is Gregor’s appearance. Grete is so upset
and revolted by the way he looks that she can hardly stand to be in the room
with him, and his mother is so horrified when she sees him as she and Grete are
moving his furniture that she faints. In addition, Gregor’s presence is never
forgotten in the house, causing the family members to feel constantly
uncomfortable and leading them to speak to each other mostly in whispers.
Moreover, the fact that Gregor cannot communicate his thoughts and feelings to
them leaves them without any connection to his human side, and consequently,
they come to see him more and more as an actual insect. All these factors
combined steadily work against their sympathy, and the family reaches a point
where Gregor’s presence is too much to bear. Significantly, it is Grete, the
character to show the most sympathy toward Gregor, who decides they must get
rid of him.
Alienation
Perhaps the greatest consequence of
Gregor’s metamorphosis is the psychological distance it creates between Gregor
and those around him. Gregor’s change makes him literally and emotionally
separate from his family members—indeed, from humanity in general—and he even
refers to it as his “imprisonment.” After his transformation he stays almost
exclusively in his room with his door closed and has almost no contact with
other people. At most, Grete spends a few minutes in the room with him, and
during this time Gregor always hides under the couch and has no interaction
with her. Furthermore, he is unable to speak, and consequently he has no way of
communicating with other people. Lastly, Gregor’s metamorphosis literally
separates him from the human race as it makes him no longer human. Essentially
he has become totally isolated from everyone around him, including those people
he cares for like Grete and his mother.
But as we learn over the course of
the story, this feeling of estrangement actually preceded his transformation.
Shortly after waking and discovering that he has become a bug, for example,
Gregor reflects on his life as a traveling salesman, noting how superficial and
transitory his relationships have become as a result of his constant traveling.
Later, Gregor recalls how his initial pride at being able to support his family
faded once his parents began to expect that support, and how he felt
emotionally distant from them as a result. There is also no mention in the
story of any close friends or intimate relationships outside his family. In
fact, the alienation caused by Gregor’s metamorphosis can be viewed as an
extension of the alienation he already felt as a person.
