My take on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

A few days ago I read Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” What an awesome, crazy, fascinating story. I recently took a fiction class where we discussed the difference between story and discourse, and I think Kafka’s story is a brilliant example of this. On the surface, it’s a story about a man who is turned into a giant insect. But that’s just the story, just the what happens. The discourse, the what does it all mean, is where its brilliance lies and the reason I love to read in the first place. If stories were just about what happens in them, I wouldn’t choose to be an English major.

I love stories that aren’t obvious, where I have to do a little thinking to figure it out. I realized, while doing this thinking, that the title of this story is crucial to its discourse. I am of the opinion that I am terrible at coming up with titles (but my prof says I’m not allowed to say that anymore, so please forget you just read that sentence, Medrie). Kafka’s title, on the other hand, is brilliant and critical to understanding his discourse. If he had called it “My Life as a Bug,” the focus would have been only on Gregor and the depth of the story would have been lost. But calling it “The Metamorphosis” makes the reader think about the whole concept of one thing being transformed into something else.

On the surface, the metamorphosis seems pretty clear. The main character, Gregor  Samsa, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant beetle. But there are actually a lot of different metamorphoses going on, and that’s where the true power of the story lies. Gregor’s metamorphosis results in the less-extreme transformations of the rest of his family. His father originally sits around in a chair all day, but later stands erect in a uniform; his sister undergoes a metamorphosis from a girl of leisurely violin-playing to a self-sufficient person with a job; his father goes from being penniless to having money secretly stashed away. As soon as he is unable to bring home the paycheque that supports his family’s leisurely lifestyle, their feelings towards him morph from appreciation to disgust. In the beginning, his sister loves him, but in the end she wants to get rid of him. Strangely, even though he is the one who has physically undergone the most obvious metamorphosis, he is also the one who changes the least, because his feelings towards his family remain as loving and steadfast as ever. Even when they leave him to live in squalor and allow him to starve to death, he continues to love them. His feelings towards them are unchanging, even though physically he is completely changed.

This is the way I want to write, so that the story is about more than it seems to be about on the surface. Which is so very much harder than it seems like it should be.