The Metamorphosis Essay Research Paper The MetamorphosisKafka

The Metamorphosis Essay, Research Paper

The Metamorphosis

Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” in 1912, taking three weeks to compose

the story. While he had expressed earlier satisfaction with the work, he later

found it to be flawed, even calling the ending “unreadable.” But whatever his

own opinion may have been, the short story has become one of the most popularly

read and analyzed works of twentieth-century literature. Isolation and

alienation are at the heart of this surreal story of a man transformed overnight

into a kind of beetle. In contrast to much of Kafka’s fiction, “The

Metamorphosis” has not a sense of incompleteness. It is formally structured

into three Roman-numbered parts, with each section having its own climax. A

number of themes run through the story, but at the center are the familial

relationships fundamentally affected by the great change in the story’s

protagonist, Gregor Samsa (Lawson 27).

While the father-son relationship in the story appears to be a central

theme, the relationship between Gregor and his sister Grete is perhaps the most

unique. It is Grete, after all, with whom the metamorphosed Gregor has any

rapport, suggesting the Kafka intended to lend at least some significance to

their relationship. Grete’s significance is found in her changing relationship

with her brother. It is Grete’s changing actions, feelings, and speech toward

her brother, coupled with her accession to womanhood, that seem to parallel

Gregor’s own metamorphosis. This change represents her metamorphosis form

adolescence into adulthood but at the same time it marks the final demise of

Gregor. Thus a certain symmetry is to be found in “The Metamorphosis”: while

Gregor falls in the midst of despair, Grete ascends to a self-sufficient, sexual

woman.

It is Grete who initially tries conscientiously to do whatever she can

for Gregor. She attempts to find out what he eats, to make him feel comfortable,

and to anticipate his desires. Grete, in an act of goodwill and love toward

Gregor, “brought him a wide assortment of things, all spread out on old

newspaper: old, half-rotten vegetables; bones left over from the evening meal,

caked with congealed white sauce; some raisins and almonds; a piece of cheese,

which two days before Gregor had declared inedible; a plain slice of bread, a

slice of bread and butter, and one with butter and salt” (p. 24). Besides being

the only member of the family still willing to face Gregor daily, she is also

the family representative of Gregor, in a sense, to a mother who doesn’t

understand and a father who is hostile and opposing. The father is physically

violent toward his metamorphosed Gregor, pushing him through a door in Part I:

“…when from behind his father gave him a strong push which was literally a

deliverance and he flew far into the room, bleeding freely” (p. 20). Grete

appears to concentrate on protecting Gregor from this antagonistic father and an

indecisive mother. In Part II, when Grete leads her mother into Gregor’s room

for the first time, we see the strange way in which Grete has become both the

expert and the caretaker of Gregor’s affairs (Nabokov 271). She convinces her

mother that it is best to remove all of the furniture from his room. Kafka

attributes her actions partly to an adolescent zest: “Another factor which might

have been also the enthusiastic temperament of an adolescent girl, which seeks

to indulge itself on every opportunity and which now tempted Grete to exaggerate

the horror of her brother’s circumstances in order that she might do all the

more for him” (p. 34).

The change in Grete’s attitudes and actions toward Gregor probably fully

begin in Part II, during the scene where Gregor struggles over to the window and

leans against the panes to look outside. Grete, seemingly beginning to forget

the Gregor still has human feelings and sensitivities, rudely opens the window

and voices her disgust at the distasteful odor of his den. Moreover, she

doesn’t bother to hide her feelings when she sees him. One day, about a month

after Gregor’s metamorphosis, “when there was surely no reason for her to be

still startled at his appearance, she came a little earlier than usual and found

him gazing out of the window…she jumped back as if in alarm and banged the

door shut; a stranger might well have thought he had been lying in wait for her

there meaning to bite her” (p. 30). Against her mounting insensitivity is

Gregor’s poignant selflessness (Nabokov 270). In a marvelous display of feeling

and compassion for his sister and her feelings, he expends four hours of labor

to carry a sheet on his back to the couch to hide himself from her sight, thus

sparing her the disgust of looking at him.

As Grete’s behavior begins to change, Grete begins to slide closer and

closer to his demise. At the end of Part II, Gregor’s f

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