Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis is a classic in the genre of experimental symbolic fiction that arose in the early 20th century. Following hard upon Karl Marx’s theories of worker alienation, the protagonist of the story, Gregor Samsa, is the personification of the deadening of the soul amidst the rise of the industrial revolution. The ironic lesson that is learned from reading The Metamorphosis is that Gregor Samsa undergoes a metamorphosis in the physical sense only; philosophically Gregor had always been a bug and becoming one physically has no effect on his enjoyment of life.
Gregor sticks stubbornly to the very same conformist mindset after his metamorphosis that he trusted in before. Even though Gregor awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant bug, and after realizing that he is no longer human, Gregor’s thought processes experience no transformation (Kafka 1997). Instead of reacting with open anxiety, Gregor thinks, at length, about his job and family; he becomes anxious about the passing time and preoccupied with his new bodily sensations and his strange aches and pains” (Bouson 56). In other words, Gregor cannot escape from the fact that even as a human, he was dehumanized. His concerns over mundane familial obligations serve to underscore that Gregor is now a bug in physical form, but he has been little more than a bug in psychic form all along.
According to Karl Marx, the laborer’s “work is external to the worker, i.e., it does not form part of his essential being so that instead of feeling well in his work, he feels unhappy, instead of developing his free physical and mental energy, he abuses his body and ruins his mind” (Bloom 107). Gregor is the ideal symbol for what Marx is complaining about; he is alienated from the product he works to create because he doesn’t own it. In addition, he really isn’t even working for a wage for himself; his wages are directed toward taking care of his father’s debts. Once Gregor changes bodily into the bug he was philosophically all along, his isolation and alienation becomes complete. Gregor Samsa’s transformation into vermin presents self-alienation in a literal way, not merely a customary metaphor become fictional fact...No manner more drastic could illustrate the alienation of a consciousness from its own being than Gregor Samsa’s startled and startling awakening” (Bloom 105). Finally, Gregor’s alienation from his humanity is totally physicalized and realized: “That is to say, Samsa, having been a successful salesman, was once the pillar of his family, but now, being helpless, his sister assumes in the eyes of his parents the role of leadership and reassuring strength that he had once occupied” (Scott 37). Just as an insect is only a small player in the grander scheme of nature and not expected to experience such things as content or ambition, so does Gregor eventually give over entirely to a system intent on destroying those key components of humanity.
Works Cited
Bloom, Harold, ed. Franz Kafka’s the Metamorphosis. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.
Bouson, J. Brooks. A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the Drama of the Self. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
Scott, Nathan A. Rehearsals of Discomposure: Alienation and Reconciliation in Modern Literature: Franz Kafka, Ignazio Silone, D. H. Lawrence . New York: King’s Crown Press, 1952.
Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis.” The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Vol. F: The Twentieth Century. 2nd Edition. Ed. Sarah Lawall. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
