Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis or The Transformation is one of the more amazing books I have read. There have been many translations of this work, and I read David Wyllie’s version. I am drawn to the weird, the unexplained, the deeper interpretations of life, and this story was such a perfect combination of all that. “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.” - and that’s the very first sentence of the book; the first sentence of a story that raises as many questions as it inspires answers.
The Metamorphosis is the story of Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, complete with an “armour-like back”, “brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections” and “many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.” It is the story of how that inexplicable transformation changed everyday life for Gregor and his family. On a deeper level, it is the story that raises certain fundamental questions about the very meaning of existence.
In a not too unfamiliar situation, Gregor is stuck in a job he doesn’t like, because he needs to offset a financial need. The job has all those typical elements, right from the hateful work to the spineless assistant and the mean boss; yet he has not wavered from his utter and complete devotion to his work on any grounds.
The great irony of the story is that even after being turned into an insect, Gregor still continues to think of how to make up for being late to work. The great tragedy of the story is that after devoting 15 unflinching years of his life to his job, the very first time that he is late, the chief clerk comes over, and derides him for being unprofessional.
From human to bug, from shock and scare to disgust and hatred, and then finally, the moving on of Life like nothing ever happened… this was a story that got me as angry as it got me sad, as outraged as it got me helpless… it stirred so many, many emotions.
At the end, it felt like we are all bugs, insignificant little creatures scurrying about our unimportant jobs in a meaningless existence. Even when faced with physical proof of our triviality, we continue to work conscientiously at a thing that has long lost its meaning. We do things we hate - even excel at it - because of an inescapable obligation. Sadly, at the time of need, none of those people for whom we toil, dare to step over to our side of the battle. As we see with Gregor, at best, his family did ‘well-meaning’ things that made it worse (as when his sister and mother decided to remove all his favourite belongings to give him space to crawl about in, but made the room more strange and hostile), or, at worst, completely shunned and even shooed him away with a stick or a newspaper (as his father did; ironically, because of whom, Gregor was stuck in that job to begin with).
Because no explanation is ever given for what happened to Gregor Samsa, this blog is of course just conjecture; I would be interested to see what your thoughts on the matter are, and invite you to post a comment!
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