Lamron Lit Corner: The Absurd in The Metamorphosis

“For now he must lie low and try, through patience and the greatest consideration, to help his family bear the inconvenience he was bound to cause them in his present condition.”

~Frans Kafka, The Metamorphosis

Let’s try this: you wake up one morning after having a string of odd dreams that are lost on you now, and when you look down at your body you realize it’s no longer your body, but that of a massive insect. What’s your first thought?

For Gregor Samsa, it’s how he’s going to get to work.

I first read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis for AP Literature senior year of high school. It’s a short novella, only about an hour and a half or maybe two hours’ worth of reading. I took it all down in a day and found myself with only one question:

‘What’s the point?’

It was a question many of my classmates shared with me. You pick up a story about a man who turns into a bug and your first thought is, ‘Why is he a bug? What turned him into it? Who turned him into it?’ Then, you find yourself at the end without any of these questions answered, and you’re filled with half-astonishment, half-confusion as to how this book has become a staple of literature.

I’m very, very happy I gave this book another chance, as now it’s all come together for me. The Metamorphosis isn’t a story about the dangers of science or a tale of a giant bug-man ravaging through a city. It’s a story about a man who finds himself living in a strange body, worried not about himself and his past, but about what his family will think when they find out. It’s a tragedy about isolation and grief and shows a man shriveling away as his family watches on, pushing the pressure down harder and harder. 

The older I get the more I’ve come to appreciate the ‘absurd’ sides of philosophy and literature, a lot of which was heavily influenced by Kafka. The power of this ideology is making the reader look inward rather than outward. Perhaps my classmates and I didn’t understand what the point of Gregor’s story was because we didn’t want to. Perhaps we saw too much of him in ourselves, understood too well what it felt like to wake up one day and find ourselves staring at a stranger in the mirror. 

Kafka could have written a story about that—just an ordinary person who had been dragged down by the weight of the world—but that wouldn’t have had the same lasting impact on the world as what he really did end up producing. In the end, does it really matter if he’s a giant cockroach or a tired man dragged down by society?

I don’t believe so, and that’s the point we were all missing.