Metamorphosis | Book Review
Literary critics who adopt a certain interpretation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, first published in 1915, in my view misread the novella’s meaning. According to this interpretation, Metamorphosis is a commentary on alienation and the absurdity of life in general. William Aaltonen in the introduction to his 2009 translation writes that the plight of protagonist Gregor Samsa, a young travelling salesman and cloth merchant who wakes one morning to find he has been transformed “into a kind of giant bug”, is “a metaphor for the human condition” and that Kafka “has hit on something universal in human experience.”
Metamorphosis will certainly strike a chord with readers, but not quite in the way these critics surmise. What they miss is that Kafka’s work is about alienation and the absurdity of life under capitalism. When Gregor awakens to find himself transformed into a large insect, his immediate thought is not for himself, but panic that he has overslept and will be late for work. Gregor is the main breadwinner in his household, which also consists of his elderly father, mother, and teenage sister Grete. He dislikes his job as a salesman, but feels compelled to stay in it to provide for his family and pay off the money Mr. Samsa owes his employer.
In the wake of his transformation, Gregor’s main concerns are missing the train, whether he can call in sick, and above all worrying he will lose his job. Similar to many employers today more than a century later, Gregor’s boss shames workers who call in sick:
Supposing he called in sick? But that would cause its own problems, and be suspicious, too: during the five years he’d been with the firm he had never once had the slightest illness. The manager would turn up with the Health Insurance doctor. He would reproach his parents for their son’s idleness and cut short all objections by repeating the doctor’s refrain: there are no sick people in the world, only the workshy.
This passage is equally applicable today in an age where bosses will tell employees infected with COVID-19 to come into work. We hear often of people coming into work despite being sick, potentially infecting everyone around them. But under the irrational capitalist system, health, safety, and the social good are always subordinated to profit. Kafka himself was very familiar with this lack of concern for workers. Starting in 1908, Kafka worked for the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in the Kingdom of Bohemia, where he investigated and assessed compensation claims for workplace injuries. Lost fingers and limbs were common in industrial settings.
While Gregor’s family is horrified and disgusted by his transformation into an insect, arguably the greatest impact this has on their household is on its financial stability. Deprived of Gregor’s wages, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa and Grete find it difficult to afford their apartment and must seek alternative employment for themselves. They also take in three lodgers, who upon discovering the insect-Gregor respond by complaining about the apartment’s lack of hygiene. They leave with declarations that they will not pay for the time they have stayed, and may even sue the Samsas.
The family’s reaction to Gregor’s plight shows how the pressures of capitalism alienate us from each other, including even the most intimate relationships. Gregor’s sister Grete, whom he cares about deeply, is an accomplished violinist whom he had planned to announce that Christmas he would help to attend the local conservatory. Grete initially takes responsibility for feeding Gregor as he stays in his room, slipping in food each day. But she never addresses him in all that time.
Spoilers ahead.
When the lodgers leave, it is Grete who declares that the insect in their household is not Gregor at all, but a “monster” and a burden to the family.
‘My dear parents,’ said his sister, beating the table with her hand to get their attention, ‘things can’t go on like this. Even if you don’t see it, it’s clear as day to me. I won’t mention my brother’s name in the same breath as this monster. All I have to say is that we must find some way of getting rid of it. We’ve done everything humanly possible to care for it and put up with it. No one can say that we’re to blame.’
Mr. Samsa agrees, and underscores the stress on the family of caring for Gregor. “When people have to work all day, like us, they can’t put up with constant torture at home,” he says. “I certainly can’t.” Without the ability to provide wages to support his family, Gregor has become useless to them. These remarks from his family come near the end of the third and final chapter, after Gregor has essentially stopped eating. Upon facing this rejection from his father, mother, and sister, Gregor crawls back into his room and soon starves to death.
This sad fate makes Gregor’s initial reaction to his metamorphosis understandable. Capitalist society views workers who can no longer work as a burden on society, which of course is pure hypocrisy under the rule of a capitalist class that does not work, but enriches itself by exploiting the labour of others. Nevertheless, this is the same logic that has been used up to the present day to justify eugenics: from the Nazis’ mass murder of the mentally and physically disabled, who were seen as a burden on society, to public assurances during the COVID-19 pandemic that those who died were mostly the elderly and chronically ill—i.e. those no longer seen as “productive” by capitalists, who view workers as mere instruments for generating profit. Gregor early on expresses anger at his job and his boss:
If I didn’t have my parents to think of, I’d have handed in my notice long ago. I’d have gone to the boss and given him a piece of my mind. Knocked him off his perch! Ridiculous, the way he sits up high on his desk, so that he can talk down to us workers from a lofty height - especially when he’s so hard of hearing and we all have to stand up close to him!
Did the author intend his novella as a critique of capitalism? While we cannot fully know his mindset, it’s worth emphasizing that Kafka was a socialist who attended meetings of the Klub mladých, a Czech anarchist and anti-militarist group, and referenced the work of anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin in his diaries. Fellow student Hugo Bergmann fell out with Kafka during their last academic year together in 1900-1901 because, he says, the difference between “[Kafka’s] socialism and my Zionism were much too strident.”
Regardless of the author’s intentions, like all worthwhile art Metamorphosis expresses truths about the society from which it emerged, in this case capitalist society. Though Kafka’s writings attracted little attention during his lifetime and he remained obscure at the time of his death from tuberculosis in 1924, his work found an audience in the decades that followed and Metamorphosis is now considered one of the seminal works of the 20th century, and even of all literary fiction.
“To find an audience, artists have to be attuned to their moods, their experiences and mentality,” M.A. Olanick writes. “The most pretentious artists speak to a narrow audience, the best can connect with the widest layers. This connection is what allows them to act as a mirror for society.” It is precisely the way Metamorphosis connects with the experience of oppression and alienation under capitalism that has helped it appeal to such a wide readership. Aaltonen finds similar reasons for the rise in popularity of Kafka after his death:
Always the defendant in a trial he can never win, Kafka’s anti-hero lives in a kind of quiet, despairing hell, longing only for a peace and reconciliation that are forever denied by a faceless and merciless tyranny. One of his longer novellas is entitled The Trial [Der Prozess], another, The Judgment [Das Urteil]. It is not surprising, then, that Kafka’s work, which seems to have prefigured and even predicted Nazi bestiality, enjoyed a huge resurgence after World War Two.
Fascism, the distilled essence of imperialism, is merely the most brutal expression of capitalism. But every imperialist power has displayed this “faceless and merciless tyranny”, similar to those of the Nazis, which remains immune to any appeal to reason. Global protests around the world for more than a year have not stopped Israel from committing genocide in Gaza and now Lebanon. Similarly, Gregor’s attempts to make others understand his plight are ignored, or incomprehensible to them.
What is most striking about Metamorphosis is how it begins in a very funny manner, as we laugh at the absurdity of a man worrying about his job after he has been transformed into a giant insect—but as the work progresses, laughter gives way to the most profound pity and sadness. One can see the influence of this story on David Cronenberg’s The Fly, with its body horror and feeling of helplessness as a man transforming into a giant insect tries to cling to his remaining humanity.
Gregor has spent much of the first two months after his transformation living a monotonous life in his room, crawling along the walls and ceiling, and describes an “overwhelming desire for a nice empty room.” Yet when his sister convinces Mrs. Samsa to begin emptying out Gregor’s room, he wonders if his desire expresses the disappearance of the man he was: “Did he really want this warm, comfortable den filled with all the family furniture to be transformed into an empty cave, where he could crawl about to his heart’s content - and wave a swift goodbye to this human past?” Gregor tries desperately to save a photo on his wall of a woman dressed in furs, a reminder of his old job. Kafka’s description evokes pity:
He lay over his picture, determined not to give it up. He would sooner leap into his sister’s face. But Grete’s words had served to upset his mother; at that very moment, Mrs. Samsa turned, saw the gigantic brown blob on the wallpaper and, before she had time to take in the fact it was her son, screamed, ‘O God! O God!’ and fell back on the sofa and lay motionless, arms flung wide in total horror.
The saddest part of the novella is after Gregor’s death. Does his family express sorrow? No, they express relief. They had long since stopped believing that the insect living in their apartment was Gregor. Now they look to the future with optimism, having all found jobs and now being able to move to a smaller, cheaper, and more practical flat “in a much better neighbourhood than the one Gregor had chosen for them.” Finally, they realize that “despite all the terrible things she’d been through over these past weeks … Grete was blossoming into a beautiful, full-figured young woman” and it was time to find her a good husband.
Such profound alienation from their own family member, whom it seems they mostly valued for his ability to earn wages to support them, is an appropriately dismal note to end the story on. Marx and Engels observed in The Communist Manifesto that under capitalism, the family becomes more and more an economic relationship:
The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.
Gregor before his transformation had become a mere “article of commerce and instrument of labour.” His transformation, which renders him unable to work, gradually tears apart his ties with his family. Thus a story that began as black comedy ends as pure tragedy, at least for our protagonist.