Franz Kafka did not like humanity. He viewed our day-to-day lives (or at least the lives of people in the 1920’s) as dismally trivial. To be fair, living in Czechoslovakia in the early nineteenth century was probably no picnic. But every biography of Kafka mentions, or should mention, two factors in particular which cultivated this disdain for humanity. Kafka’s father was described as a ‘huge ill-tempered domestic tyrant’ who exercised a great deal of control over his family and scoffed at Kafka’s desire to express individual ideas. Kafka himself also consistently described his job as an insurance broker as simply a ‘bread job,’ or a job that he had no passion for but held simply to collect a paycheck.
Both of these influences are seen very literally in The Metamorphosis: Gregor’s father is neither supportive nor intellectually advanced and his job as a traveling salesman is never discussed beyond being essential for the family. But what is more important is how these factors influenced the underlying theme of the novella. The point of The Metamorphosis is not to tell us a story about a man who turns into a bug but instead is to make us reflect on the pointlessness of life.
To me there are not any impressionable scenes in the work. The story itself is uninteresting and despite its brevity it was difficult for me to finish in one sitting. And I did not find any of the characters in The Metamorphosis likeable or memorable. But when I finished the book I was left with an overall feeling of frustration. And after reflecting I realized that this is the point that Franz Kafka is trying to get across to us. Life is not exciting or revolutionary; it is grey and mundane. Anyone who tries to escape from the bubble of mediocrity, as Kafka himself attempted to do through his literature, becomes shunned by society.
The brilliance of The Metamorphosis is not in its imagery or symbolism. Kafka doesn’t try to make us identify with the problems of his characters. Instead he uses the entire book as a representation of our pointless daily struggles. As he stated, in a quote either extremely pessimistic or depressingly realistic, “One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”