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Essay on The Theme of Alienation at Home and at Work in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
This is not the only one of Kafka's works dealing with animals; in Josephine the Songstress, for example, he deals with a mouse, and in A Report to an Academy we have an ape as the central figure. In The Metamorphosis, however, Kafka's approach is different from that which he takes with others, inasmuch as the main character, a commercial traveler called Gregor Samsa, has assumed the form and the propensities of a huge vermin. In the other two stories, the animals have adopted the characteristics and qualities of humans. It is interesting also to note that the opening sentence of The Metamorphosis, telling us of the appalling transformation, is in fact the end of Gregor's ordeal.
The reader's interest is immediately focused simultaneously in two directions by the opening sentence, since he wants to know how the creature is going to adjust to and react to humans in the future, and is also fascinated by the reasons for his having been transformed into an insect in the first place.( Jose Ortega Gasset (1980)) The implication is also there that Gregor has been punished for some crime or other, and that the opening of the story is in one way the end of a tale of crime, punishment, and guilt. Yet Kafka very cleverly never openly puts the question to us as to why the transformation actually took place.
The reader is therefore in the position of simply having to accept the fact of its having taken place, and of following the narrator as he flits from the "realistic" world of humans and the surrealistic" world of beasts. (Simone Weil (1977))Yet the question of Gregor's guilt remains, for he is in a very special sense a prisoner who has been captured by some authority or other; but the nature of his guilt has to be captured in turn by the reader.......
