Are they nice?

( So unfortunately I just realized that this piece, which I had meant to publish like four weeks ago when we still discussing the Metamorphosis, remained as a drafted copy until I just now noticed it. I must have just forgotten to publish it. Anyways, I hope you still find what I have to say somewhat interesting. )

More so than other books we've read this semester I've found The Metamorphosis hard to interpret. Perhaps part of the reason for this is that it's quite a short story and as a result it has to pack meaning in much more densely than another longer story might. In the short segments that we read I actually found it hard to get myself engaged fully before I had actually finished the reading. It felt a bit for me like the novel was ending just as I was getting started with it, but hey, I suppose this is what writing is for.

There was one not so subtle aspect of the novel that I did catch up on, and it was that this is not a realist novel and the state we find Gregor is undoubtedly a metaphor for something. What exactly that metaphor is remains unclear perhaps, but it's definitely somewhere to start. For instance the first two readings I did completely void of discussion due to being sick, and immediately I started wondering what the whole thing with Gregor being "a giant vermin" was all about. In the first few pages the first conclusion I came to was that Gregor's condition was a statement from Kafka about the existential limitations of a life used for the pursuit of money. Gregor allows his employers to step all over him, and his work is probably not particularly fulfilling, so he is turned into a bug, something which people often step upon. I figured perhaps that Gregor's metamorphosis was not in fact his turning into this huge vermin, but that this would be merely a pupil stage for him, and his real metamorphosis would be when he evolved into someone who could find more meaningful pursuits in life. Admittedly I now find this theory a little trite, especially for such a famous modernist writer.

I still haven't decided what exactly the metaphor behind Gregor's condition is, but I think I have a general theme that I like more than the existential crisis brought upon by meaningless work. Throughout the novel the idea of humanity is prominent, due to Gregor's loss of any human like features. We discussed in class what it means to have humanity--what do we do that other animals don't--but there isn't any set definition for a way to act or feel that makes us human. There are actions though that we like to think of as being especially human, and compassion is one of them. It's also a very controversial notion in The Metamorphosis, at least I believe it to be. It's certainly an emotion that we know Gregor still feels, he tries it seems very hard to be considerate of his family. It's not clear the same can be said about how his family regards him after his change. Clearly it is very upsetting to them, but I saw very little sense that they grieved his loss simply because they missed him, but more because his absence meant they had to go back to working. By the end of the novel they're downright hostile to him and are majorly responsible for his death, I feel. For the human characters in the novel they seem quite unsympathetic or compassionate. Now perhaps their reaction isn't really that different from how you or I would have responded, you could replace Gregor's change with an illness--cancer perhaps--and you could imagine how their approaches to him might have been similar.

I suppose this is a depressing way to interpret this novel, but for me at least it's the most thought provoking. It would have been easy to make a statement about the pointlessness of a life spent seeking money, but much harder to paint such a picture of the nature of human compassion. For me this novel makes me wonder how and if my response to Gregor would have differed from that of the family's.

Point of View

It seems to me that in 20th Century so far the main characters of the novels we've focused on have been more controversial than I've noticed in any other english class I've taken so far, and even in books I've read outside of school. Perhaps I'm just reading books at a higher level than I used to, but I don't think so. It probably has something more to with the period of books we're reading from, that being from the modernist and post-modernist movements. I think that as a result of the "point" of the novel switching towards character study as Virginia Woolf puts it. As a result I think we get a number of characters who are harder to like than a usual narrator would be I believe. This is something to be celebrated though, since I don't think likable people are the only type of person worth studying. The interesting thing to me though is how my own perception of a character changes depending on how I'm viewing them.

The most relevant instance of this I think is the character who's point of view we're reading from right now--Rochester. By all counts I think if we were viewing him from any of the other characters in the novel would we see him as a straight up villain. As it stands I really don't like him for the most part, but that being said I have a hard time writing off everything he does. Obviously there's stuff that he does to Antoinette that we don't really get filled in by him, and as a result it's clear you lack a complete picture of who he is when he's the one describing events. That being said I still for some reason find ways that I can sympathize with him. For instance, I can see how he might feel really threatened by such an alien environment compared to his home of England. Not just the terrain, but the very type of people are very different to what he's accustomed to, and most aren't friendly. There even seems to be some merit to the claim that he was sort of forced into this marriage. All I'm saying here is that there is definitely material he talks about that gives him a more sympathetic air, which you wouldn't be privy to if you were being told his story from a different character's point of view. I think just as importantly however, there's definitely critical aspects of his personality that he chooses to leave out of the story.

Rochester isn't the only character who's been hard to sympathize with this semester though. In fact I believe that the very last character we observed was at times a hard character to sympathize with, let alone understand. Really, I think it's kind of hard to sympathize with someone who shoots and kills another person for no obvious reason. The jury at his hearing decidedly were not such people. Yet, there were still several people in my class at least who at times felt very sympathetic towards Meursault. He let's us in on feelings and insights about his situation that we could never have been experienced to otherwise, and the result is that we start to even care about him.

I don't mean to overplay the extent to which I think we do, or should, sympathize with the character whose point of view we are reading from. There's obviously loads of reasons to dislike a character like Rochester even when we're getting his side of the story. I suppose if I had to summarize my thoughts on the subject in a thesis statement though, it would be this: I see point of view as a very valuable tool for authors to demonstrate the complexities and dynamics of human character and how variable it can be, and this is especially pertinent to a movement whose goal is to study the character in depth.