This commentary on Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis explores the novel’s deep symbolism and messages of alienation, humanity, and family relationships.
Franz Kafka, a life of ostracization and alienation
Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, Czech Republic, in the Austro-Hungarian Dual Empire, the eldest son of a German-speaking Jewish middle-class family. His father, a self-made jewelry wholesaler, was practical and authoritarian, while his mother was intellectual and sensitive, coming from a family that produced many scholars, religious figures, and eccentrics. The patriarchal father and the delicate mother are in line with the biparental structure that Thomas Mann identifies as the artist’s genetic background in his book, Tonio Kröger. Interestingly, it also fits with the general statistic that the greater the genetic differences between parents, the greater the likelihood of genius.
Overall, Kafka’s life was one of ostracization and marginalization. He was Jewish-Czech in body but German in spirit, and was ostracized by the Czechs for his German tendencies; by the Austrians, citizens of the Empire, as a fringe Bohemian; by the Germans for being Jewish; at home, he was oppressed by his father’s authority; by the Christians for being Jewish; by the Jews for being an atheist; and by the general public for being a writer. In the end, Kafka was a borderline person, too German to be Jewish, too Bohemian to be German, and too Jewish to be Bohemian, yet he was classified as a German writer because he was rooted in German literature, thought, and culture and wrote in German.
His father sent him to the German Gimnazium to help him enter the upper class of Prague. Here, Kafka was exposed to German philosophy, socialism, and atheism. It was also during this time that he indulged in literature. From Goethe to Heinrich von Kleist, Adalbert Stifter, Friedrich Hebel, Grilfarzer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Knut Hamsun, Thomas Mann, Flaubert, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Robert Balzer, and many others, the works of these authors would later nourish his literary life.
In 1901, Kafka enrolled at Charles Ferdinand University, a German-speaking university in Prague. Initially, he studied chemistry, but soon realized that it wasn’t his path and switched to the humanities. However, his father’s wishes forced him to study law. During his university years, Kafka met an important person in his literary journey: his lifelong keeper, Max Brot. This man not only took the initiative to publish and publicize Kafka’s work, but also published the Yugo himself after Kafka’s death. He was a patron of the arts that any artist would envy.
In 1906, Kafka earned a doctorate in law from the University of Prague and worked for a year as a legal assistant at the Prague Civil and Criminal Courts. He then moved to an insurance company, where he worked part-time for nearly nine months. In 1908, he joined the bureaucracy of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Corporation of the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague as a bureaucrat, a position he held for fourteen years until his retirement in July 1922, during which time he became increasingly aware of the problems of bureaucratic institutions, the dangerous and harsh conditions of workers, the ruthlessness of capitalism, and the inevitable alienation of individuals under that system. This experience became an important motif for the protagonist’s transformation into a bug in The Metamorphosis. However, Kafka’s reputation in the workplace was good: he was always faithful to his duties, intelligent, and kind. But a life of integrity, rooted in civil society, did not suit him. Everything else was secondary to his “dreamlike inner life.” He saw literature as the only meaning and escape in his life.
Kafka’s relationship with women was contradictory. On the one hand, he was attracted to them and approached them actively, but on the other hand, he was defensive and ran away from them. He was twice engaged to Felice Bauer and repeatedly broke up with her; he announced and canceled an engagement to Julie Boriszek; he rashly professed his love to the married Milena Zegerska and was rejected; and he had his first stable and peaceful relationship with his last lover, Dora Diamant, who was fifteen years his junior, but it was short-lived due to her untimely death. Some have attributed his relationships with women to impotence and homosexual tendencies, but there is no clear evidence of this. However, there was a compulsion for writers to write in solitude, as if locked away in a monastery, and a fear of family commitments.
In 1917, Kafka was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis and planned to spend the rest of his life in the countryside, but his employer refused to grant him a pension. Later, insomnia and a nervous breakdown forced him to quit his job in 1922. She then moved to Berlin to live alone with Diamant, but her health deteriorated rapidly and she returned to her parents’ home. His illness showed no signs of improvement, and the TB bacteria spread to his larynx, leaving him unable to eat or speak. In June 1924, Kafka died at the Hoffmann Sanatorium at the age of forty.
The Metamorphosis
In German, there’s a word for “kafkaesk”. In general, it refers to the anxiety and confusion one feels when confronted with absurd, mysterious, and threatening situations, but in the context of Kafka’s literature, it refers to the helplessness, fear, frustration, and existential threat of the individual in the face of an absurd world and great power. The artist expresses this helplessness by borrowing improbable and surreal events and objects. And he does so with great clarity. Each sentence is extremely specific, and there is no abstraction or sentimentalization of the subject matter. The descriptions are always precise, objective, and dry, but no matter how precise the details, the events themselves are bizarre, and it is in this bizarre bewilderment that the reader is able to step back and look at the real world once again. In this sense, “The Metamorphosis” is a very Kafkaesque work.
The protagonist, Gregor, wakes up one morning suddenly transformed into a bug. Is this a dream or reality? Is it possible for a person to turn into a bug? Of course, only in the imagination. In fairy tales and fables, humans are transformed into animals like cows and frogs, but never into worms. That’s the worst kind of transformation. In fairy tales, humans who turn into animals usually become human again by saving or helping others in times of crisis. In Kafka’s story, however, the protagonist continues to live as a bug, is abandoned by his family, and dies a lonely death. Why such a far-fetched setting? Yes, Allegory. The author borrows something unreal, like a dream, to tell a story about reality. Kafka himself explains it this way. “Metamorphosis is an eerie dream. It is a creepy imagination. Dreams expose the reality of the mind. It is the horror of life. Art reveals it in a shocking way.” So what is the reality that resides within him?
Gregor is a worker bee. After his father’s bankruptcy, the protagonist, who has to support his family by working as a “traveling salesman,” wakes up every day at dawn and goes to work at a precise time. He hasn’t missed a single day of work in the past five years, and after work, he has no personal life, only the company. His only hobby is to make small frames with a small saw and put pictures of beautiful women he finds in glossy magazines. Even after he’s turned into a bug, he’s more anxious to get to work than to worry about his current situation, and all he can think about is making sure his train leaves on time. Work is everything to him. He doesn’t like it, though. As soon as he pays off his father’s debt, he’ll quit his job and start a new life. But for now, he has to work. He has to work, even if he hates it, even if it hurts, even if it makes him feel like a bug. There is no self in his existence, and work is the master of his life.
This is the kind of life that modern capitalism demands of individuals. Capitalism not only dominates human life outwardly, but also imprints its ruling principles on the inner life of the individual. Individuals must work no matter how tired they are, and they must feel “guilty” for being “only a few hours late in the morning”. The individual is a part of a vast factory, whose value is measured by how faithfully he fulfills his assigned role within it. If you don’t fulfill your function in the system, you’re useless, and you’re no better than a bug. This is also true for Gregor’s family. The German word “Ungeziefer” doesn’t refer to insects in general, but to pests that feed on healthy people. So Gregor, who is unable to fulfill his obligation to provide for his family due to his loss of labor, is no longer just an invalid, but a bloodsucker. He is no longer a human being, but an annoying “thing” to be disposed of, as the family later refers to it.
Of course, the family wasn’t always this harsh. The younger sister cares for her brother with compassion, and the mother keeps her son’s room untouched, hoping that one day Gregor will return to humanity. But even they reach the limit of their patience, and the father eventually loses his temper and throws an apple that hits his son in the back. The apple here is related to a biblical symbol that Kafka often uses. In the beginning, man was expelled from paradise by eating an apple, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In Kafka’s work, the apple is also a symbol of original sin, like a “monument in visible flesh”. However, whereas in the Bible, the original sin was having the “mind” to distinguish between good and evil, in modern capitalist society, humans who fail to fulfill their social functions, like Gregor, are sinful and culled.
On the other hand, Kafka shows us the terrifying truth that even the deepest and most unbreakable human relationships, including family, are only an illusion. From Gregor’s transformation to his death, his family’s behavior proves that even families are driven by the vested interests of labor and reward, and are not made up of pure affection. Gregor is ultimately abandoned by his family, and his death is seen as a liberation from a heavy burden.
Gregor’s transformation can also be seen as a liberation from the shackles of capitalist society. Who among us hasn’t woken up in the morning and dreamed of liberation at least once? Some of us might want to soar through the sky as a bird and enjoy a vacation on a beautiful beach, while others might want to become a whale that swims freely in the ocean and explore the world. In this way, Gregor’s transformation can be seen as an expression of his unconscious desire to live a different life, free from the obligations of parenthood that have imprisoned him.
Now let’s return to Gregor’s real life. Whether his transformation into a bug is a metamorphosis of his workaholic existence or an unconscious desire to escape his past life of dependency, he must live in the body of a bug from now on. At first, of course, the body is foreign to him, but over time he grows accustomed to it and finds and indulges in food that suits his insect nature. But inside, he’s still human. A human being who “tries to be as patient and considerate as possible to help his family endure this unpleasant situation he has caused,” a human being who worries about his family’s future, reminisces about the past, feels compassion, thinks logically, and is sensitive. Gregor, then, is a contradiction in terms, living with a human mind in a worm body, and while his body gradually adapts and becomes accustomed to life as a worm, his mind is increasingly tormented by his family’s coldness. Gregor is left with a choice. Will he stay a bug or become a human?
Gregor’s appetite grows less and less satisfying, partly because of the pain from the apple in his back, partly because he is saddened by the change of scenery in his familiar room. But more than that, it’s the hurt he feels from his family. Then one day, he realizes what he really wants: food. Gregor’s sister is playing the violin in front of the boarders when he realizes what he really wants: food for the spirit, not food to sustain his physical life. It was as if a path had opened before his eyes to “find the unknown form for which he longed.” Later, he remembers his family with “feeling and love.” Perhaps “the idea that he should disappear” was more firmly established in him than in his brother. In the end, he lays down his exhausted and sickly body and dies peacefully in the faint light of dawn. His transformation is meant to awaken a longing for the human being in the animal.
Meanwhile, after Gregor’s withered body is removed, the family picnics outdoors in the sunshine for the first time in a long time, and in their relief, they talk of a better future. Seeing Gregor’s sister “blossom into a beautiful, voluptuous young woman,” the parents decide it’s time to find her a good husband. They feel that their “good intentions” were right. As a reader, it’s hard not to feel sorry for them.
