Metamorphosis
Author: Franz Kafka
Originally Published: 1915
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
written by: Tina Nguyen | date: 1st March, 2025
A tragic story of a normal salesman who woke up and found himself turned into a giant roach on his bed. Metamorphosis talks about his hardships when Gregor Samsa had a body of a bug not only in doing his routines but also even the smallest things in life like opening the door by grasping the doorknob or eating. The storyline portrayed clearly the alienation and disdain of his father towards him from the start, alongside with the empathy of his sister and his mother’s utter shock. Gregor lost his sense of belonging more obviously towards the end of the book when his sister and mother saw him as a “family duty compelled one to choke down” and the family tolerated him as a burden. Kafka used metaphor by implying the image of a normal man turned into a roach overnight to highlight the idea of being an unaccepted and hateful creature simply by existing.
“Whenever the conversation turned to the necessity of earning money, Gregor would let go of the door, and throw himself on to the cool leather sofa beside it, because he was burning with sorrow and shame.”
Feeling tired and disgusted with himself, Gregor’s misery and both physical and mental pain later led him to his death. The 3 members of his family moved to a new place as a way to escape reality and start their new life without the existence of “the cockroach”. The stark shift in the pronoun that his sister — the one who was considered to have the utmost respect for him even after his transformation, gave him at the very end of the novel, went from “him” to “it”. This detail shows a turning point in her patience and tolerance toward Gregor as they have finally gone, and she has done everything she could. The shift in the pronoun for Gregor illustrated all the pent-up frustration, despair, and exhaustion of even the most caring and respectful person in his life — she did not know if he was aware of his metamorphosis or understood what the family members said. This was where Gregor lost all hope in life — a rotten apple sept gradually into his back, the way his family members turned their backs to him, left him there dying in his room.
“‘Dear parents,’ said his sister, and brought her hand down on the table top to obtain silence, ‘things cannot go on like this. You might not be able to see it, but I do. I don’t want to speak the name of my brother within the hearing of that monster, and so I will merely say: we have to try to get rid of it. We did as much as humanly possible to try and look after it and tolerate it. I don’t think anyone can reproach us for any measure we have taken or failed to take.”
In conclusion, Metamorphosis has bluntly demonstrated the idea of being alienated using imagery and metaphor of the cockroach, an animal that can barely be loved by people. As I believe that everyone has been through the feeling of loneliness, the sense of belonging has been lost, and has had a severe existential crisis like Gregor Samsa at least once in their lifetime. Kafka successfully captured and described this universal feeling in the unique storyline. Nevertheless, the classic novel stays popular to this day, reminding people who are feeling lost, unseen, and unlovable that there was someone on this Earth who had experienced this before, and that they are not alone.