The metamorphosis by Kafka is not your average story. A man turns into a roach for no reason. But what really surprised me was how nonchalant Gregor was about it. He sees his squirming legs and was all “Oh I’m late for work” when he should be:
When he lived under the couch as an insect, I felt really bad for him. To me his transformation into an insect was a way of conveying how minuscule his importance is in life and his simple worker mentality. Despite the horrific circumstance he is in, he thought only of work, not his own well-being. This made me think of him being a cog in the machine.
He seemed to have no real significance because his existence was taken for granted by his family and employer.
When looking at Gregor’s life as an insect, this image came to mind
This is a patient living on life support. When Gregor became an insect, he was biologically alive. But because he could no longer express himself and was shunned by his family, Gregor was dead to them. He had no personality or uniqueness to his family He had become a burden, a memory of the past, living like a vegetable.
Gregor’s transformation seemed to complete a metaphor that Kafka intended to use to compare an unremarkable person’s life to an insect.
I liked your picture of the patient on life support. I had not ever thought of Gregor to be like that. You explained it pretty well too and I agree that Gregor is like a patient on life support in that he was suffering but only us as readers knew about it. Nobody else in his family did. It was like going into the mind of someone who is about to pass and seeing how they feel. Although that’s less gross than peeking into the mind of a cockroach it helps us understand the context better.
Janice Fong
I like how you compared Gregor with a patient on life support. He definitely did seem to become a burden to the family: someone who needed to be fed, cleaned after, and taken care after. It only seems natural that the family should have done all this since they were living under a roof that Gregor had paid for. When he became a bug, like you said, it makes his importance become close to none. He previously made a lot of money (at least that’s what I would guess, since his family seemed to talk about the house as if it were a large one) but after becoming a bug, his importance diminished drastically. Perhaps this shows that someone who worked like a robot and only cared about work really isn’t that important at all.
I especially agree with your comparison of Gregor to a patient on life support. I imagined his situation to be like a vegetative state where a person is in a sleep-wake cycle. After Gregor transforms into a cockroach, he is technically alive and aware; however, he is emotionally dead since he is trapped and isolated from society. Much like a patient, the Gregor’s family cannot truly understand the suffering because they cannot communicate with him. Constantly having to fed and clean after him, Gregor becomes a burden on his family. I believe Gregor’s death was the only way to end his suffering.