Finishing up The Metamorphosis, I would like to get some comments off my chest. First of all, this book was bizarre. It was a great read - gripping plot, excellent imagery, etc., etc. But it disturbed me deeply. Gregor's plight and his family's inexcusable misconduct made this short story one of the saddest and perhaps truly unfortunate novella I have ever encountered. There are layers on top of layers of bitter humor, and reading the book was deeply uncomfortable. Not only do I despise insects, but it was Kafka's descriptions of Gregor as the hapless, helpless type of rodent that struck me as a reader. His sister treats him as a wearisome pet; after the initial excitement of caring for him faded, she turned against him. His parents are not a different story. His father is ashamed of him and his mother, while kind and perhaps maternal, is hopeless at caring for him. It was her futility and lack of effort that upset me too. Why doesn't she try harder for Gregor? Sure she's physically weak, but that doesn't mean her mental faculties have to be correspondingly weak too.
Secondly, there's the ending to consider. The way the parents sized up their daughter was definitely portending something dreadful. They were planning to marry her off, which was a normal thing to do when one's daughter comes of age. But the way they saw her stretching her young body reminded me of animal owners examining their livestock for dinner. Certainly marrying Grete off would bring connections and perhaps salvation to the withering yet managing Samsa family, but considering that their son had just died last night from their neglect and mistreatment, this immediate attention turned on their daughter made the parents seem awfully parasitic. They were desperate for comfort and not above selling off and exploiting their children to satisfy their own whims.
1 comment:
I wonder how much of the "horror-movie" quality of the ending, as the monsters size up their next victim, is due to the utter strangeness of what comes before it. Couldn't we imagine this same scene playing out at face value--two proud parents looking at their daughter and suddenly beaming with pride as they notice, on this fertile spring day, how much she's grown up? "Marrying off" a daughter, as you note, was the usual course of events, and so it doesn't *have* to seem so hideous. In other words, there's little "objectively" horrific about this final vignette. And yet Gregor's dying breaths cast such a pall over this final scene--and I hear Gregor's self-effacing point of view throughout the narration at this point, almost as if this is his self-negating fantasy of how it *would* play out after he's gone. When Kafka writes happiness, it comes across as even creepier than when he writes darkness and shadows. This is a real achievement.
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