Ignoring the several (all equally convincing) claims to have found a 'code' to Kafka's writing; to therefore read The Metamorphosis 'plain' -
* Franz Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis' - rejection. Surely Kafka begins most of his stories with a predicament? Doesn't he usually start by setting down, right at the beginning, one of these bizarre and strangely imaginative predicaments, in this case the metamorphosis itself? When Kafka's writing 'works' for a reader, there is this immediate hook. And after that . . .
Surely one of the themes in The Metamorphosis that can chime with a reader is rejection? Rejection is slightly disturbing; every human is 'rejected' every time it walks any busy street. Others are utterly disinterested in it. They easily deal with the situation daily: but it's always there. The rejection of Samsa is more brutal than the daily, for his appearance is non-human, and it is not only the rejection of visiting acquaintances, it is the rejection of family. And the rejection begins at Kafka's initial predicament, this metamorphosis.
Gregor Samsa has been transformed into something that disgusts, yet something that is complicated. He looks beetle-like yet he's perhaps a metre or so long, he thinks, he speaks (initially), he sighs, he has (undescribed) nostrils . . . he's a metre long part-beetle part-person to sum up. And importantly he is Gregor Samsa. Readers are given his words and his thoughts; he's a person like them, and he is surrounded by family. Gregor is reduced to being at floor level and this happens:
. . . (his father) 'began stamping his feet and flourishing the stick and the newspaper to drive Gregor back into his room. ( - ) . . . and with the tail-ends of his jacket thrown back, his hands in his trouser pockets, advanced with a grim visage towards Gregor. Likely enough he did not himself know what he meant to do; at any rate he lifted his feet uncommonly high, and Gregor was dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles.'
It is an earlier tender moment between his sister and himself, a moment when the young girl seemed to realize that Gregor had gone to the trouble to cover his disgusting self with a sheet so that she need not gaze upon him, and she seemed to show him a thankful glance, it is that moment which seems to make all the more hurtful her later rejection:
'"We must get rid of it," his sister now said explicitly to her father, since her mother was coughing too much to hear a word.'
The horror of this rejection will only come across if a reader is able to hold on to Gregor being a person like himself or herself, and the final lack of any impulse to have a burial, and the final 'touch' being that of a broom, is a terminus to Gregor's life that is horrifically consistent.
'"Dead?" ( - ) "I should say so," said the charwoman, proving her words by pushing Gregor's corpse a long way to one side with her broomstick. Mrs Samsa made a movement as if to stop her, but checked it.'
Somehow that pushing of the corpse 'a long way' makes it worse.
* Franz Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis' - the grasp of living horizontally not upright. Perhaps one other interesting thing that some people dwell on. Kafka writes, ever so well, the problems of being horizontal doesn't he? Indeed the very first moment Samsa descends and falls flat on the floor and finds that these numerous tiny legs of his at last have found their function, is a moment when his mother ascends out of the way, and from the off the gulf between the two 'positions' is established.
'But in the same moment as he found himself on the floor, rocking with suppressed eagerness to move, not far from his mother, indeed just in front of her, she, who had seemed so completely crushed, sprang all at once to her feet, her arms and fingers outspread, cried: "Help, for God's sake, help!" bent her head down as if to see Gregor better, yet on the contrary kept backing senselessly away; . . .'
Kafka describes a coming to terms, a settling in, with a life on the flat, and thereafter (rightly?) leaves much of the predicament to the imagination:
'. . . he had plenty of time to meditate at his leisure on how he was to arrange his life afresh. But the lofty, empty room in which he had to lie flat on the floor filled him with an apprehension he could not account for, since it had been his very own room for the past five years and with a half unconscious action, not without a slight feeling of shame, he scuttled under the sofa, where he felt comfortable at once, although his back was a little cramped and he could not lift his head up, and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get the whole of it under the sofa.'
The clumpings of feet and the scrapings of furniture being moved trouble Gregor inordinately. Kafka achingly describes the longing of a man now consigned to living on the floor, his eyes pointing down and needing raising to address anything 'up there' in the world he still loves. It's his sister, she and her violin playing, whom he wants down there with him, his sister who should 'bend down her ear to him'.
Some of us frankly might choose to simply stop eating and drift into a gentle suicide. Franz Kafka's Samsa, despite all the adroit comedy, is a very quiet and a very domestic tragedy.
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