Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (1915) probably gave me a lifelong neurosis, when I read it as a teenager. The story of Gregor Samsa turning into a bug, and thereby being ostracized from the world, disturbed me and inflamed whatever inferiority complexes I developed as an adolescent. I would always return to that image of Gregor waking up as a bug, as a kind of recurring nightmare.

I have reread "The Metamorphosis", partially because, I found, there are arguable similarities between my prose and Kafka's (which is funny because I began writing emulating Kafka, ultimately rejecting him, and now I'm running back to him, starry-eyed). I have a different interpretation of what I think is a masterpiece. But I am made cautious by what William Gass said:

Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. "Okay, I get it," we say, dusting our hands, "and that takes care of that." "At last I understand Kafka" is a foolish and conceited remark.

Kafka, ultimately, is inscrutable. The reason I found myself so strangely related to him is that I realized that, for the sake of an unusual image or feeling, I will sacrifice the coherency of the story, and I don't think this is bad writing whatsoever. It is Lynchian, it is like Picasso, it is using the passage to create pure expression, to craft the sudden passion of a moment and the vitality of a sudden flare of the nostril or tension in a muscle. Reading Kafka's work is entering a flow, and the river may diverge whenever it so chooses, as a sonata by Beethoven. Kafka was a poet foremost, I believe, as one can see from his chamber music in "Meditations" (1912).

"The Metamorphosis" has three parts, the first being Gregor's titular metamorphosis, the second his adaptation, the third his death. The first part is an introduction to the metamorphosis and how it upends Gregor's life as a traveling salesman.

And this is very important to note: Gregor being an insect is very unimportant to the story. It hardly matters at all. Gregor could have been turned into a blobfish or a similarly ugly animal, and the text surprisingly changes little. What is more important is that Gregor, on one hand, is physically incapable of resuming his duties as a traveling salesman, and on the other that he is so content in his transformation he doesn't show all that much eagerness to go back. The chief clerk reveals why: everyone in his firm is an asshole, who demands he works for some reason, not a very good one, in my opinion. But Gregor simply shrugs it off: I can't. Then, Gregor shows himself to the chief clerk and his family, and the chief clerk is so disgusted Gregor is implicitly fired. Point one for Gregor; he was thankfully so ugly he didn't have to put on his bug suit and bug bowler and hop on the train.

For that is the mechanism of "The Metamorphosis": things mostly go Gregor's way. At no point does Gregor actually have a goal or anything he wants; in fact, by the third part, he is absolutely suicidal for very little reason, as the events around him cause only a moderate amount of emotional distress. There is a reason why Freudian interpretations are fruitful (and yet still inconclusive) for Kafka's works: a lot of the stories are wish-fulfillments with a powerful censoring authority following behind.

The second part revolves around Grete, the most active character in the novella, who helps Gregor adjust to his new life. The second part ends with Gregor's father shouting, no, what is there to adjust to? culminating in his throwing apples at Gregor, wounding him. It's somewhat comical, the situation they're in. But the second part, I think, is clear: his family tries to accommodate to Gregor's lifestyle, to the point where they find unique ways to interact with him, until the father definitely declares that Gregor is not one of them, hurting his son. And this works for Gregor: yes, not only am I not human (and thereby exempt from human things), I got hurt by this apple, so what can I really do?

The third part shows the metamorphosis of the family, and this is when the story really changes, and it gets really exciting and confusing and surreal. So let's be clear about Gregor's family: they're parasites. They're justified early on by a debt the father supposedly owes to Gregor's firm (???) but not only is Gregor the sole caretaker of the debt, Kafka more-or-less says the family does nothing all day but sleep. Gregor's sister, Grete, doesn't go to school. Gregor's father and mother don't work. In fact, Gregor's father "lingered [breakfast] out for hours over various newspapers." HOURS. Maybe this is because I'm from the smartphone era, but who reads a newspaper for hours??!!

Later, Gregor's dad, in a huge dick move, tells the family, actually, we do have a bit of money, I just didn't want to use it to pay off the debt, which act Gregor thinks is reasonable. Sure, it may have been a rational decision, but wow, that's pretty disrespectful to Gregor (which aspect of Czech / Eastern European culture Kafka may have been commenting on). So the family was more-or-less on okay footing the whole time.

The third part reverses this: the whole family, but Gregor, get jobs, and that's when they begin to be really cruel and negligent to Gregor - and this is in the context of 1. living with him for years and 2. he barely eats anything because he has lost all pleasure in eating or living. The family also changes charwomen and takes up three lodgers who I guess are friends with each other.

Here's the thing: Gregor is apparently so horrifying the chief clerk had to leap off the stairs to escape him and his mother was near-dying of fainting from him. But the old charwoman and the lodgers look at Gregor and just shrug.

One could argue that Kafka meant for them to be seen as unwelcomed monsters as Gregor is, as the family later triumphantly expel the rude lodgers from their household. This interpretation makes sense. I go by a different one: Gregor's family are the real monsters and normal people are repulsed by them. I remind the reader that the lodgers only got upset when Gregor's father believed they should be upset.

What helps this interpretation is that Gregor's family has no friends. Again, they don't seem to have lives outside of the story. When the charwoman, their employee, is happy for them and struggles to tell them, for some reason, she cleaned up Gregor's mess for them, Gregor's father is holding back a big bulging vein to tell her to GET OUT! The Samsas then resume their isolated, selfish, lonely existence, unbothered by people who need only one minor defect to bother them; indeed, the train car they take at the end of the novella is but for them inexplicably empty, likely because they Karen'd before the trip began.

Grete is the most likeable person in the family - by the fact Gregor likes her - and the third part flips this by making her very unlikeable, very vain, very defensive, very screechy. By the end of the novel the parents look at how pretty Grete is and think: what kind of Gregor-like victim can we feed this monster with?

Okay that last bit is a stretch, but I do think it's a little valid. In any case, the family's change in fortune, from relying on Gregor as sole breadwinner to having their own employment, allows them to tower over Gregor and demand he die. And Gregor, weary of life, does so, immediately. Again, Gregor always gets what he wants.

So what do we take away from "The Metamorphosis"? Nothing.

Okay, jokes aside, considering how Kafka's own life went - even though he couldn't control his getting tuberculosis, I know - Gregor's storyline is of pure fantasy: I don't want to be a salesman, now I'm a bug, okay I suffer some consequences but I actually don't mind them and even anticipate them, and now I get to die and not worry about life and miraculously no one worries about my life anymore, in fact my death makes them happy. The family's storyline is of pure betrayal: what starts out as fidelity towards their family member devolves into revenge against this thing, no longer their family member, for the mere reason he has undergone a metamorphosis and they have neither the patience nor intelligence to understand and negotiate with this new creature (which perspective I have because, in my writing, unlike Kafka, my characters negotiate all the fucking time, it absolutely is a choice). Their relationship is animalistic, protecting their lives over Gregor's on the mere slight that Gregor exists and breathes and lives.

And so the Freudian interpretation is fulfilled: by having his family hate him, Gregor gets to have his secret wish, which is to die, and not deal with this shitty mortal existence anymore. In fact, because his family did not reciprocate the self-sacrificing behavior he displayed when he was empowered, it's actually quite good he died, so as to separate himself from the ungrateful louts. Well, a real Freudian interpretation would have more sex in it - maybe you can analyze the portrait of the woman in Gregor's room he's so defensive over? But in any case, Gregor is now free, because Kafka does not exclude the concept of an afterlife, in fact Kafka never calls death bad, and I would definitely believe Kafka would think, "It's absurd to think life just ends, no heaven, sure, but life just ending, I dunno about that." That's a speculation, of course.

And so that's "The Metamorphosis" in my eyes, a very weird, a very logical, a very baffling work with no one interpretation, but a series of strange psychological relationships and beliefs that will surely be an inspiration for critical essays to come. I know it will haunt my dreams and bug me (har har) on my own insecurities in my relationships and life style forever more, but now I'm not afraid to approach it, and indeed the power of its aesthetics makes me want to read Kafka's works all over again, where, with "Country Doctor" and "Hunger Artist", his mind became a labyrinth and he himself transformed into a demanding and profound writer, whereupon he tragically died way, way, way too early.

You could look at "The Metamorphosis" from a Daoist perspective. This gives me the opportunity to butcher a famous anecdote in the "Zhuangzi". Zhuang Zhou is admiring fish under a bridge with a friend. Zhuang Zhou says, "Look at how graceful and free the fish are! They must be happy." His friend says, "You're not a fish, how would you know if these fish are happy?" Zhuang Zhou retorts, "You're not a fish either, so how do you know whether I know how a fish feels, bitch?" This is meant to demonstrate one of Daoism's major tenets, that everything in existence (not life, existence specifically) is relative and understanding the true substance of life is accepting that multiple interpretations can be simultaneously true and untrue. Again, Gregor doesn't care at all that he's a gross, nasty bug and, as he discovers, other people don't care he's a gross, nasty bug. The people who are actually gross and nasty are the people declaring what is gross and nasty, which is, again, a very Daoist concept, that by distinguishing you are at once inflexible, for you have chosen only one interpretation and therefore only one set of goals, and excessive, for you are unnecessarily indulging in an interpretation and a set of goals which may not pertain to the actual truth. It's Gregor who is attuned to the real quality of life, and it's Gregor who, in dying, accepts that life and death are equal, a very Daoist concept, though it's much too nihilistic in this context and so I shrug at this interpretation.

"Metamorphosis" is an early masterpiece, though, at the age of 32. Unlike Gregor, Kafka's becoming a bug did not end in death. In an ironic twist, Kafka later became as helpless and awkward as the insectoid Gregor, debilitated by tuberculosis. He would spend some time in the sanatorium and also some time with his sister Ottla who surely did not resent his company because, what do you know, his sister wasn't a perfect human with a perfect life and a perfect excuse to tell her brother to fuck off. His sister, unlike Grete, enjoyed the company and the conversation another human provided, because she wasn't an inhuman monster freak.

Kafka's angst was a silly angst after all. He was frustrated with the circumstances of his life, but, to his surprise and to his disappointment, there is no denouement in our tension with life; our misery just metamorphoses into something else, until we, unfortunately, die. Kafka molted, shedding off the simple, direct, symbolist approach of his earlier writing and metamorphosed into the brilliant creature we all know and love, someone with startling insight into being and the tension that comes when that being is in conflict with different modes of being, from others and from ourselves. His primary obsession was with static systems that find internal ways of producing artificial change, and then introducing actual damaging change to those systems and observing how they reacted. And that too is another neurotic tic in writers: the character dies, so we live. Enough, however.