Reading thoughts: the Metamorphosis
Dec. 14th, 2025 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
valzhangI read this story a long time ago, I reckon when my brain had hardly been formed. Ten years old? Eleven? I retained the general plot, but forgot all about the rest. So when I failed to find Hamlet at the bookstore, I thought I'd pick up a Kafka collection and experience this for the first time again.
What I wasn't ready for is how extremely, heartachingly sad this story is. There were so many parts where I got close to crying, and so many parts where I actually did shed a few tears. The third person narration of Gregor rends your heart apart. His love for his family radiates through every single word and to see it met with callousness, cruelty, and fear is awful. This is an awful awful book in the best way possible.
It's through this sadness that we properly glean what the story is unsubtly trying to say about capitalism. In his family where he is the sole provider and the rest of his family is content to take from him (and which he is content to provide because he loves them so much), Gregor is only seen as their means of survival, their cash cow. He worked day in and day out, a corporate slave while his healthy father and mother did nothing. And the very first time he was late to work, all they cared about was getting him there, because to them that was all he was and all he lived to do. Which is also a view shared by Gregor himself, no doubt shaped by the world they lived in. He turned into a literal insect (I know the original simply used the word 'vermin', but my copy straight up translates it as 'cockroach') and his first thought was "How am I going to get to work?" How visceral and terrible.
There are just so many things about this. The way his sister initially wanted to take away his furniture because she saw he enjoyed crawling over the walls; but as time passed and she started caring less and less, she was fine with everyone shoving unwanted furniture and junk into his room. Every act of kindness from her is bittersweet in the way that she is trying to care, but she can't even bring herself to look at him or come close to him, her brother, her brother who had loved her so much he was going to pay to send her to the conservatory. Because he was the only one who cared about her music passion. Her parents don't, the later tenants don't, but after so long in isolation Gregor came out just to hear her play. Grete is not hateable like her parents or the other characters, especially considering she's a child, but she too lapses into hating Gregor by the end. Their relationship stabbed me all throughout this book.
Not to mention his father, throwing apples at him, and one of it literally embedding itself into his flesh. He can't move around freely or crawl anymore, one of his few pleasures taken away from him. And later on his father gets angry at his lumbering movements when it was his violence that had caused it in the first place. He laments saying that Gregor can't understand them, even though he very much can, and it's the family that never attempted to understand him.
All this embeds itself in Gregor just like the apple. The descriptions of his self-hatred were so real. He had done no crime, had never intended to hurt anyone, and yet everyone including himself hated him like he had. When his father was a useless financial burden, the rest of the family was quick to love him and be affectionate over him. But when it was Gregor's turn to be taken care of unconditionally, he was turned away, and he thinks it's his fault for the sin of existing.
And the end where he dies and his family practically rejoices, moves away, starts a new life that's better and warmer, as if the universe itself is celebrating Gregor's death. They're so much happier without him, and it's horrible. I genuinely had a pit in my stomach by the end of this story. You just don't stop feeling for Gregor. He worked and when he stopped working, he was unloved and died.
The writing style is great. Easy to understand, but no less detailed for it. Some of the descriptions of Gregor's new body were very vivid. It's dry, which fits Gregor's characterization as a man who had dedicated his life to working and providing. But despite its unfeeling style of prose, you can feel the emotion very clearly. Just like how Gregor, despite now being mostly unable to show it in a way his family can understand, still felt very strongly. He was in a cockroach's body, but his human emotions are overwhelming in the narrative.
This is short, around 60 pages. But in those 60 pages this story makes you feel for and understand Gregor, the dynamics of his family, and how capitalism indelibly ruins our lives and our human connections. 9.5/10, maybe just straight-up a 10.
What I wasn't ready for is how extremely, heartachingly sad this story is. There were so many parts where I got close to crying, and so many parts where I actually did shed a few tears. The third person narration of Gregor rends your heart apart. His love for his family radiates through every single word and to see it met with callousness, cruelty, and fear is awful. This is an awful awful book in the best way possible.
"'Help, oh please God, help me!', inclined her head as though for a better view of Gregor, but then, quite at variance with that, ran senselessly away from him; she forgot the breakfast table was behind her, on reaching it, she hurriedly, in her distractedness, sat down on it, seeming oblivious to the fact that coffee was gushing all over the carpet from the large upset coffee pot.
"'Mother, mother,' Gregor said softly, looking up at her."
It's through this sadness that we properly glean what the story is unsubtly trying to say about capitalism. In his family where he is the sole provider and the rest of his family is content to take from him (and which he is content to provide because he loves them so much), Gregor is only seen as their means of survival, their cash cow. He worked day in and day out, a corporate slave while his healthy father and mother did nothing. And the very first time he was late to work, all they cared about was getting him there, because to them that was all he was and all he lived to do. Which is also a view shared by Gregor himself, no doubt shaped by the world they lived in. He turned into a literal insect (I know the original simply used the word 'vermin', but my copy straight up translates it as 'cockroach') and his first thought was "How am I going to get to work?" How visceral and terrible.
There are just so many things about this. The way his sister initially wanted to take away his furniture because she saw he enjoyed crawling over the walls; but as time passed and she started caring less and less, she was fine with everyone shoving unwanted furniture and junk into his room. Every act of kindness from her is bittersweet in the way that she is trying to care, but she can't even bring herself to look at him or come close to him, her brother, her brother who had loved her so much he was going to pay to send her to the conservatory. Because he was the only one who cared about her music passion. Her parents don't, the later tenants don't, but after so long in isolation Gregor came out just to hear her play. Grete is not hateable like her parents or the other characters, especially considering she's a child, but she too lapses into hating Gregor by the end. Their relationship stabbed me all throughout this book.
Not to mention his father, throwing apples at him, and one of it literally embedding itself into his flesh. He can't move around freely or crawl anymore, one of his few pleasures taken away from him. And later on his father gets angry at his lumbering movements when it was his violence that had caused it in the first place. He laments saying that Gregor can't understand them, even though he very much can, and it's the family that never attempted to understand him.
All this embeds itself in Gregor just like the apple. The descriptions of his self-hatred were so real. He had done no crime, had never intended to hurt anyone, and yet everyone including himself hated him like he had. When his father was a useless financial burden, the rest of the family was quick to love him and be affectionate over him. But when it was Gregor's turn to be taken care of unconditionally, he was turned away, and he thinks it's his fault for the sin of existing.
And the end where he dies and his family practically rejoices, moves away, starts a new life that's better and warmer, as if the universe itself is celebrating Gregor's death. They're so much happier without him, and it's horrible. I genuinely had a pit in my stomach by the end of this story. You just don't stop feeling for Gregor. He worked and when he stopped working, he was unloved and died.
The writing style is great. Easy to understand, but no less detailed for it. Some of the descriptions of Gregor's new body were very vivid. It's dry, which fits Gregor's characterization as a man who had dedicated his life to working and providing. But despite its unfeeling style of prose, you can feel the emotion very clearly. Just like how Gregor, despite now being mostly unable to show it in a way his family can understand, still felt very strongly. He was in a cockroach's body, but his human emotions are overwhelming in the narrative.
This is short, around 60 pages. But in those 60 pages this story makes you feel for and understand Gregor, the dynamics of his family, and how capitalism indelibly ruins our lives and our human connections. 9.5/10, maybe just straight-up a 10.
"And yet his sister was playing so beautifully. Her face was inclined to the side, and sadly and searchingly her eyes followed the columns of notes. Gregor crept a little closer and held his head close to the ground, so as to be prepared to meet her gaze. Could he be an animal, to be so moved by music?"