What If Your Family Member Became a Giant Cockroach?: 3 Themes Elegantly Expressed in The Metamorphosis

What If Your Family Member Became a Giant Cockroach?: 

3 Themes Elegantly Expressed in The Metamorphosis 

By Sam Newman

     I recently read the novel The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (originally published in German in 1915 as Die Verwandlung, which also means “The Transformation”). The book is about a man named Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who lives with his family in a middle-class apartment and financially supports them. One night, Gregor randomly turns into a giant human-sized insect, whom his family must help in order for Gregor to continue living. Gregor also loses his ability to speak and his independence. Over time, Gregor’s family changes their views on him, going from helping him in his new form and hoping for his recovery, to thinking he is a burden on the family and disowning him. This book has many aspects that make it unique, as well as an interesting ending that I will not spoil. There are three main themes that I picked up while reading The Metamorphosis, which I believe are demonstrated especially well in this book and make it a worthwhile read for young adults.

Themes in The Metamorphosis:

     1. A family is an ecosystem (if you change one thing, it changes the whole system).

     The book illustrates just how much a single family member can affect all other members. In The Metamorphosis, there are multiple different changes that result from one original change to Gregor, like a pebble falling into a body of water: the falling pebble is the original change and the ripples of water reflect the cascading changes over time. Of course, the first change/metamorphosis is Gregor's physical change into a human-sized insect. Whereas it does not change the way he thinks or his intentions, the major physical change triggers all of the other changes in the book. From this change, Gregor’s family dynamic instantly changes.

     Gregor’s dad was lazy, worthless, and sickly before the transformation, but after the transformation, Gregor’s dad got a job as a bank messenger, lost weight, and he became more aggressive and violent (mostly toward Gregor). Gregor’s mom was originally affectionate toward Gregor, but also lazy and sat around the house all day giving the maid orders, until the transformation. Afterward, she purposefully avoided looking at Gregor for days at a time, became nervous and afraid of him, and prayed that he would recover and turn back into a human. She was also forced to take on work as a seamstress. Next, the family’s maid quits her job (technically, she asks to be fired) in order to no longer have to see Gregor.

     Gregor’s sister Grete changes most of all. She initially takes good care of Gregor by feeding him and testing to see which sorts of food he prefers, but later she eventually just shoves scraps into his room with her foot without caring whether he likes it or not. She starts to think of caring for Gregor no longer as being nice but as a chore. She treats him like he stinks (always opening the window) and she cannot stand the sight of him. Grete was initially jobless and was considered to be an unhelpful girl. In the course of the novel, Grete changes into a woman who is mature and has a paying job as a salesperson. Near the end of the book, Grete resents Gregor for being a burden on the family, so much that when their mom tries to clean Gregor's room that Grete purposely did not clean, Grete is offended and tells her to stop and to leave the room filthy. To Grete, Gregor was initially a person in a bug's body, but eventually he is just seen as a nasty bug.

     Observing the family system, I noticed that everyone displays a different stage of grief in response to Gregor’s change. Gregor’s mom tries to deny that Gregor has changed by not looking at him. Gregor’s dad shows anger by throwing apples at Gregor and threatening to kill him. Grete shows depression by losing interest in work and only does the things she has to. The maid abandons the situation.

     2. People with disabilities can get dehumanized.

     One of the main themes in the novel is the loss of respect for Gregor (as stated above). You might be asking yourself, “Why did his family stop caring about Gregor, if he is still himself?” I believe the reason why they stopped caring about him was that he stopped doing work to financially support the family. At the beginning of the story when Gregor wakes up and is more than an hour late for work, his family is respectful to him and assumes he will go to work and everything will be fine. However, when they see that he is an insect, they realize he will not be able to leave the house (which means he cannot be a salesman and support them anymore). Gregor’s family almost automatically starts treating him negatively. His father kicks him through the doorway and yells at him, his family locks him into his room without letting him leave ever, they spend the bare minimum amount of time with him (especially his mom who runs away when she sees him), they feed him rotted food that they do not want, the maid refers to him as “old dung beetle,” and his sister refers to him as an animal and remarks that he should run away in order to honor her brother’s memory. Later on, when the family has lodgers stay in their apartment to make extra money, the lodgers leave without paying rent when they see that Gregor is living in the same apartment with them. He is treated as an animal and a nuisance.

     This situation reminds me a lot of how people sometimes disrespect the disabled, the elderly, and people in nursing homes. For example, when you become old and no longer work, some people might start to see you as “worthless”. Your family, the people who once respected you, might put you in unfavorable living conditions, not visit you, and ignore that you are stuck there like a prisoner waiting to die (and claiming it is better for you to die before you are remembered as old/weak/flawed--similar to what Grete said about Gregor). When people lose some of their capabilities, they are sometimes wrongly thought of as less-than-human.

     3. When people treat you inhumanely, you tend to internalize it and believe you are unworthy.

     When Gregor starts to realize how his family views him, he starts behaving differently. When Gregor realizes that his family dislikes seeing him, he tries to hide under the couch in his room, and covers himself with a sheet during the day so his sister does not see him. He also hides on his ceiling when people enter his room, and he sleeps under his bed because he feels like he does not deserve to sleep on top of it. Gregor also becomes more timid/afraid after his father attacks him, cripples him, and threatens to kill him all just because his mother was afraid of his looks. When Gregor overhears that his family members think that he is a nuisance, he becomes hopeless and so depressed that he starts starving himself. Because everyone started to treat him poorly, he started to treat himself poorly as well.