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.