The beauty of literature is its capacity to entreat various, often contradictory readings the multiplicity of which seemingly betray that "standard" meaning. If literature grants the possibility of its own multi-understanding, how are we, as readers, to guide ourselves through its maze of words, avoid the dead ends and eventually reach the exit? There is no plan for this maze, no preconceived idea. To enter it with an array of prejudices is an instance of a lack of tact. Illuminating as most of the critical approaches have been, most of them suffer from the same impediment of being highly deterministic. Psychoanalytics,the blackmailers as Sartre dubbed them, see Oedipal complex in every story that has a man involved in it and Marxists tend to be oversensitive to the market economy and capitalism. They seek for predetermined answers rather than let literature guide their findings. Literature breeds its own conventions and to impose a ready-made interpretative model is, to say the least, slightly dishonorable.
Having taken such a precaution, I have let my reading pose its own questions and have sought the answers that the text initiates. Certainly, I may be quite naive in my findings or show a degree of superficiality but hopefully all the faults will be at least partially excused in light of my yet inexperienced thought.
I have read writers suggesting that when crafting a story one should introduce a period of stability which then will be interrupted by an event that sets the protagonist on his quest to redeem the lost stability. Then the structure of the story would be somewhat similar to the representation of a heart beat - a flat line in the beginning followed by a sudden peak of energy and then another flat line.
"The Metamorphosis" evinces evidence that suggests the story skips its initial period of stability and plunges directly into the moment that shatters the relative order. We know very little of the period prior to Gregor's transformation and whatever clues we can piece together are sifted either through the medium of his indirect speech or through the emotional blunderings of his mother or through the demanding interrogations of the chief clerk. We are led to understand that Gregor is a traveling salesman who has been for some time supporting his family and trying to relieve them from the burden of a debt towards his employer. He holds an occupation that is believed to be stable by his parents, one that would be sufficient for him even in the future. But what the chief clerk mentions almost in passing is that despite Gregor's fifteen years of service his "turnover has been very unsatisfactory of late" and "nor is [his] position all that secure". The clerk's presence in the family home, which is in itself an intrusion of the strong professional space into the fragile intimate, is in contrast to what Gregor assures himself with - that the company would not seek to suspend him for a single failure to show to work. In addition, in the second chapter we learn that when he was bringing home money those were "good times and they had never come again" because his income is revealed to have served only to be put on the table in return for some "warm affection". The intimate relations Gregor shares with the members of his family seem to be dependent on a commerce transaction that impregnates them with a certain fragility. All this suggests that the moment of instability has been initiated some time before Gregor finds himself turned into a vermin in the beginning of the story; that the lost period of relative order is situated in a moment that is not narrated and as such might not have existed at all. Gregor himself at one point confesses that "he could think of no way of bringing peace and order to this chaos." Afterall, what is being narrated is what is being created.
The welfare of the family then seems to be under a covert threat even from the beginning of the story and is further jeopardized when Gregor wakes to be a vermin. Mr. and Mrs. Samsa along with their daughter are thrust into a succession of changes that are thought to eventually bring the family closer to a state of relative stableness - both parents go back to work and consent to have their daughter's room rented out and Grete herself finds a job. But the three foreign people that mingle in their house eventually usurp it through their demands and impair the established constancy of family evenings and of the role each person as a family member has:
"These earnest gentlemen - all three of them had full beards, as Gregor learned peering through the crack in the door one day - were painfully insistent on things' being tidy. This meant not only in their own room but, since they had taken a room in this establishment, in the entire flat and especially in the kitchen. Unnecessary clutter was something they could not tolerate, especially if it was dirty. They had moreover brought most of their own furnishings and equipment with them."
Bringing their own furniture and stacking the unused ones in Gregor's room, the "earnest gentlemen" displace the family and steadily claim the Samsa's territory in a subtle attempt to take over the whole proceedings in the apartment. With the introduction of the tenants, the Samsas become their servants and as the story shows, nobody is in a more precarious situation than the easily-replaceable servant who can be so quickly and easily dismissed that it just requires one brief dependent clause : "so now the maid was dismissed" for his departure.
But a servant surely does not wear a uniform. Paradoxically, Mr.Samsa goes to work "dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons, the sort worn by the employees at the banking institute" only to serve them their breakfast. The uniform is a piece of clothing that is usually associated with order, discipline and authoritative control. The desire to achieve some stability has taken a physical embodiment in Mr.Samsa's attire and the uniform becomes a symbol of an inclination so strong that it overcomes all other necessities for he hardly takes it off when at home.
Earlier we mentioned that the story unfolds within a peak of instability which has started prior to the first sentence and which is sustained through almost all of the novella. The lack of stability is somewhat covert but by going through a careful reading one can have glimpses of its manifestations. The economical anxieties the family endure prior and after Gregor's transformation, the commercialization of endearments between family members, the intrusion of the unfamiliar into the intimate space of the family home, the discrepancy between form and substance which Mr. Samsa's attire reveals and the change of status the family forgoes when deciding to rent part of their apartment imply a presence of a nervousness with the current situation, one which is not at all concrete and orderly. The text shows a desire to break away from that moment. In the end, the wish is fulfilled by the conscious loss of a family member and it may be argued that stability has been achieved through the sacrificing of that member. Linguistically, Gregor is turned into a vermin-he wakes only to realize he has been changed which suggests no active control over his transformation. After his metamorphosis his encapsulation is doubled - not only does he have to deal with a shell which is not naturally his but he is estranged into a lair of his own. His immediate surroundings take various shapes starting from a human room to a lair than to a room which resembles more of a garbage room than anything else. His ultimate faith creeps in front of itself and we can see how the text foretells Gregor's death by first estranging him in a foreign body than incarcerating him in a series of spaces that sinisterly develop towards a tomb. His sister is the one to feed him but she shows no speck of affinity or affection towards him and is the one to actually elicit the final verdict on his faith. Gregor is to die, killed seemingly by accident by his own father on the instigation of his sister and only then can the family rejoin in stability.
In a supreme initiation into generic uncertainty, Gregor is turned into a vermin right from the first sentence. What is significant here is the passive construction that narrates his transformation : "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin." The language suggests no active participation from Gregor who in turn right from the beginning is victimized, objectified and estranged not only from his immediate surroundings but from himself as well. He no longer achieves unity by coherence between form and substance, or by the natural laws that govern them but by the bonding agent of the mystical "curse" that has befallen him, the origins of which we are never told explicitly. From the moment he is transformed he is thrown into the pursuit of coming into terms with his identity, of stabilizing his human substance with his animal form. His unity, though, will never be achieved. In the last indirect locution we hear of him "Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?", the answer is unnecessary for the very presence of the question forfeits the possibility of a completed unity. Moreover, Gregor at this moment in the story is about to fulfill his ultimate purpose of being actually a sacrifice.
But we will leave the moment of actual sacrifice for a while and focus on the environment of Gregor, on the space he is forced to inhabit. Since his transformation he is rarely allowed to exit his room and for the most of chapter two is locked inside it. What has happened is an act of reversal for Gregor is no longer the one that locks out but the one who is locked in and he no longer occupies the authoritative position of the key holder who has the benefit of choice of whether to stay in or out, to lock or not to lock. Encapsulated in his room and fed by his sister, who seems to have turned into a sort of cage-master, Gregor is shut off from everything outside and is effectively trapped, "incarcerated in his own room". Whether it is really his or not is a somewhat dubious question for we see how the room changes its shape and function several times throughout the story. First it was a human room but with the aid of the sister is gradually stripped of most items that are a reminder for a human presence and starts to adhere more to a lair rather than a human territory. With the subsequent stacking of useless furniture and the accumulation of the dust it seems that the room foregrounds its final use of a tomb. The feeling of incarceration is further supported by the fact that Gregor has absolutely no contact with the outside environment and despite his efforts he is incapable of acquiring any information about it.
"He had used to feel a great sense of freedom from [looking out the window], but doing it now was obviously something more remembered than experienced, as what he actually saw in this way was becoming less distinct every day, even things that were quite near[...]if he had not known that he lived in Charlottenstrasse, which was a quiet street despite being in the middle of the city, he could have thought that he was looking out the window at a barren waste where the grey sky and the grey earth mingled inseparably"
Notice the word freedom here and how it implicitly brings with itself its opposite - captivity. The window is no longer able to provide the illusion of freedom, a state that has started to resemble a memory, something already in the past, but only offers a blurred overview of an indistinguishable landscape. The opposition between the inside of Gregor's room and the outside of the world is sustained up to the painful extreme of denying any possibility of reconciliation between them. Gregor can not see the outside and retains only a memory of what freedom once was for he is, in fact, destined to never leave his room.
The sense of his victim hood is further kindled by the sudden introduction of the charwoman:
"an enormous, thick-boned charwoman with white hair that flapped around her head came every morning and evening to do the heaviest work"
This character who is nameless just as everybody else besides Gregor and Grete is embedded linguistically with her function. Char according to Collins Dictionry means to burn or be burned and a sacrifice is at times done through the burning of the victim. It could also be that the "heaviest work" to be done is to get rid of the remains of the body, something that the charwoman is more than glad to do in the end of the story. Having so fulfilled her predefined purpose we are told that "tonight she gets sacked".
Gregor is killed by his father. A faith that has been somewhat foretold at various moments in the text and is finally realized in chapter three in which he dies out of exhaustion caused by his festering wound inflicted to him by his father. It would seem that the only thing that saved Gregor at the time of his fight with Mr. Samson is the intrusion of the mother who rushes in and throws herself at the feet of her husband "begging him to spare Gregor's life". The ultimate fate of Gregor is only substituted with a prolonged suffering that will in time lead to the same conclusion. He finally dies after his sister, the one who Gregor thought was most close to him but showed some features of being a cage-master as she fed him and arranged his room, voices the verdict which would put an end to all the misery of instability the family has endured so far. The moment she maкes the sentence clear is just after the family have had their presence in the family home totally diminished:
"She calmly prepared everything for her to begin playing; his parents, who had never rented a room out before and therefore showed an exaggerated courtesy towards the three gentlemen, did not even dare to sit on their own chairs; his father leant against the door with his right hand pushed in between two buttons on his uniform coat; his mother, though, was offered a seat by one of the gentlemen and sat - leaving the chair where the gentleman happened to have placed it - out of the way in a corner."
The parents occupy a space that is neither in nor out - the mother is put away in a far corner not having the courage to change her position and the father is at the door, a edgeline position that strips him of all authority and of all possible presence within the room. Mr and Mrs Samsa do not even "dare" to move in their own house for it has been totally usurped, their unstable situation has come to such an extremity that it has become impossible for them to even think that they own their own ground. The predicament that they are in though will eventually come to an end. For his sister numerous times asserts that "it's got to go","that's the only way" and "we have to try and get rid of it" in the hope that after Gregor, who by now has not only seized to be taken care of but has had his status diminished to an indefinite it, the family will finally earn its share of stability and order.
And order surely comes round for after Gregor dies Mr. Samsa is able to assert himself and drive out the foreign influence of the three tenants and save his home. In the final paragraph we see the family invigorated and rejuvenated after their ordeal. They are discussing their future plans after realizing that their present occupations might as well be sufficient for them. They have stepped out of the unstable economic situation and into the more stable state of each having independent means of subsistence. The family are outside of their home, the place where it all happened and are ready to "forget about all that old stuff". Grete is "blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady", as if she has undergone an initiation into life that has required of her to sacrifice another one, even if it is her brother's.
Having taken such a precaution, I have let my reading pose its own questions and have sought the answers that the text initiates. Certainly, I may be quite naive in my findings or show a degree of superficiality but hopefully all the faults will be at least partially excused in light of my yet inexperienced thought.
I have read writers suggesting that when crafting a story one should introduce a period of stability which then will be interrupted by an event that sets the protagonist on his quest to redeem the lost stability. Then the structure of the story would be somewhat similar to the representation of a heart beat - a flat line in the beginning followed by a sudden peak of energy and then another flat line.
"The Metamorphosis" evinces evidence that suggests the story skips its initial period of stability and plunges directly into the moment that shatters the relative order. We know very little of the period prior to Gregor's transformation and whatever clues we can piece together are sifted either through the medium of his indirect speech or through the emotional blunderings of his mother or through the demanding interrogations of the chief clerk. We are led to understand that Gregor is a traveling salesman who has been for some time supporting his family and trying to relieve them from the burden of a debt towards his employer. He holds an occupation that is believed to be stable by his parents, one that would be sufficient for him even in the future. But what the chief clerk mentions almost in passing is that despite Gregor's fifteen years of service his "turnover has been very unsatisfactory of late" and "nor is [his] position all that secure". The clerk's presence in the family home, which is in itself an intrusion of the strong professional space into the fragile intimate, is in contrast to what Gregor assures himself with - that the company would not seek to suspend him for a single failure to show to work. In addition, in the second chapter we learn that when he was bringing home money those were "good times and they had never come again" because his income is revealed to have served only to be put on the table in return for some "warm affection". The intimate relations Gregor shares with the members of his family seem to be dependent on a commerce transaction that impregnates them with a certain fragility. All this suggests that the moment of instability has been initiated some time before Gregor finds himself turned into a vermin in the beginning of the story; that the lost period of relative order is situated in a moment that is not narrated and as such might not have existed at all. Gregor himself at one point confesses that "he could think of no way of bringing peace and order to this chaos." Afterall, what is being narrated is what is being created.
The welfare of the family then seems to be under a covert threat even from the beginning of the story and is further jeopardized when Gregor wakes to be a vermin. Mr. and Mrs. Samsa along with their daughter are thrust into a succession of changes that are thought to eventually bring the family closer to a state of relative stableness - both parents go back to work and consent to have their daughter's room rented out and Grete herself finds a job. But the three foreign people that mingle in their house eventually usurp it through their demands and impair the established constancy of family evenings and of the role each person as a family member has:
"These earnest gentlemen - all three of them had full beards, as Gregor learned peering through the crack in the door one day - were painfully insistent on things' being tidy. This meant not only in their own room but, since they had taken a room in this establishment, in the entire flat and especially in the kitchen. Unnecessary clutter was something they could not tolerate, especially if it was dirty. They had moreover brought most of their own furnishings and equipment with them."
Bringing their own furniture and stacking the unused ones in Gregor's room, the "earnest gentlemen" displace the family and steadily claim the Samsa's territory in a subtle attempt to take over the whole proceedings in the apartment. With the introduction of the tenants, the Samsas become their servants and as the story shows, nobody is in a more precarious situation than the easily-replaceable servant who can be so quickly and easily dismissed that it just requires one brief dependent clause : "so now the maid was dismissed" for his departure.
But a servant surely does not wear a uniform. Paradoxically, Mr.Samsa goes to work "dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons, the sort worn by the employees at the banking institute" only to serve them their breakfast. The uniform is a piece of clothing that is usually associated with order, discipline and authoritative control. The desire to achieve some stability has taken a physical embodiment in Mr.Samsa's attire and the uniform becomes a symbol of an inclination so strong that it overcomes all other necessities for he hardly takes it off when at home.
Earlier we mentioned that the story unfolds within a peak of instability which has started prior to the first sentence and which is sustained through almost all of the novella. The lack of stability is somewhat covert but by going through a careful reading one can have glimpses of its manifestations. The economical anxieties the family endure prior and after Gregor's transformation, the commercialization of endearments between family members, the intrusion of the unfamiliar into the intimate space of the family home, the discrepancy between form and substance which Mr. Samsa's attire reveals and the change of status the family forgoes when deciding to rent part of their apartment imply a presence of a nervousness with the current situation, one which is not at all concrete and orderly. The text shows a desire to break away from that moment. In the end, the wish is fulfilled by the conscious loss of a family member and it may be argued that stability has been achieved through the sacrificing of that member. Linguistically, Gregor is turned into a vermin-he wakes only to realize he has been changed which suggests no active control over his transformation. After his metamorphosis his encapsulation is doubled - not only does he have to deal with a shell which is not naturally his but he is estranged into a lair of his own. His immediate surroundings take various shapes starting from a human room to a lair than to a room which resembles more of a garbage room than anything else. His ultimate faith creeps in front of itself and we can see how the text foretells Gregor's death by first estranging him in a foreign body than incarcerating him in a series of spaces that sinisterly develop towards a tomb. His sister is the one to feed him but she shows no speck of affinity or affection towards him and is the one to actually elicit the final verdict on his faith. Gregor is to die, killed seemingly by accident by his own father on the instigation of his sister and only then can the family rejoin in stability.
In a supreme initiation into generic uncertainty, Gregor is turned into a vermin right from the first sentence. What is significant here is the passive construction that narrates his transformation : "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin." The language suggests no active participation from Gregor who in turn right from the beginning is victimized, objectified and estranged not only from his immediate surroundings but from himself as well. He no longer achieves unity by coherence between form and substance, or by the natural laws that govern them but by the bonding agent of the mystical "curse" that has befallen him, the origins of which we are never told explicitly. From the moment he is transformed he is thrown into the pursuit of coming into terms with his identity, of stabilizing his human substance with his animal form. His unity, though, will never be achieved. In the last indirect locution we hear of him "Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?", the answer is unnecessary for the very presence of the question forfeits the possibility of a completed unity. Moreover, Gregor at this moment in the story is about to fulfill his ultimate purpose of being actually a sacrifice.
But we will leave the moment of actual sacrifice for a while and focus on the environment of Gregor, on the space he is forced to inhabit. Since his transformation he is rarely allowed to exit his room and for the most of chapter two is locked inside it. What has happened is an act of reversal for Gregor is no longer the one that locks out but the one who is locked in and he no longer occupies the authoritative position of the key holder who has the benefit of choice of whether to stay in or out, to lock or not to lock. Encapsulated in his room and fed by his sister, who seems to have turned into a sort of cage-master, Gregor is shut off from everything outside and is effectively trapped, "incarcerated in his own room". Whether it is really his or not is a somewhat dubious question for we see how the room changes its shape and function several times throughout the story. First it was a human room but with the aid of the sister is gradually stripped of most items that are a reminder for a human presence and starts to adhere more to a lair rather than a human territory. With the subsequent stacking of useless furniture and the accumulation of the dust it seems that the room foregrounds its final use of a tomb. The feeling of incarceration is further supported by the fact that Gregor has absolutely no contact with the outside environment and despite his efforts he is incapable of acquiring any information about it.
"He had used to feel a great sense of freedom from [looking out the window], but doing it now was obviously something more remembered than experienced, as what he actually saw in this way was becoming less distinct every day, even things that were quite near[...]if he had not known that he lived in Charlottenstrasse, which was a quiet street despite being in the middle of the city, he could have thought that he was looking out the window at a barren waste where the grey sky and the grey earth mingled inseparably"
Notice the word freedom here and how it implicitly brings with itself its opposite - captivity. The window is no longer able to provide the illusion of freedom, a state that has started to resemble a memory, something already in the past, but only offers a blurred overview of an indistinguishable landscape. The opposition between the inside of Gregor's room and the outside of the world is sustained up to the painful extreme of denying any possibility of reconciliation between them. Gregor can not see the outside and retains only a memory of what freedom once was for he is, in fact, destined to never leave his room.
The sense of his victim hood is further kindled by the sudden introduction of the charwoman:
"an enormous, thick-boned charwoman with white hair that flapped around her head came every morning and evening to do the heaviest work"
This character who is nameless just as everybody else besides Gregor and Grete is embedded linguistically with her function. Char according to Collins Dictionry means to burn or be burned and a sacrifice is at times done through the burning of the victim. It could also be that the "heaviest work" to be done is to get rid of the remains of the body, something that the charwoman is more than glad to do in the end of the story. Having so fulfilled her predefined purpose we are told that "tonight she gets sacked".
Gregor is killed by his father. A faith that has been somewhat foretold at various moments in the text and is finally realized in chapter three in which he dies out of exhaustion caused by his festering wound inflicted to him by his father. It would seem that the only thing that saved Gregor at the time of his fight with Mr. Samson is the intrusion of the mother who rushes in and throws herself at the feet of her husband "begging him to spare Gregor's life". The ultimate fate of Gregor is only substituted with a prolonged suffering that will in time lead to the same conclusion. He finally dies after his sister, the one who Gregor thought was most close to him but showed some features of being a cage-master as she fed him and arranged his room, voices the verdict which would put an end to all the misery of instability the family has endured so far. The moment she maкes the sentence clear is just after the family have had their presence in the family home totally diminished:
"She calmly prepared everything for her to begin playing; his parents, who had never rented a room out before and therefore showed an exaggerated courtesy towards the three gentlemen, did not even dare to sit on their own chairs; his father leant against the door with his right hand pushed in between two buttons on his uniform coat; his mother, though, was offered a seat by one of the gentlemen and sat - leaving the chair where the gentleman happened to have placed it - out of the way in a corner."
The parents occupy a space that is neither in nor out - the mother is put away in a far corner not having the courage to change her position and the father is at the door, a edgeline position that strips him of all authority and of all possible presence within the room. Mr and Mrs Samsa do not even "dare" to move in their own house for it has been totally usurped, their unstable situation has come to such an extremity that it has become impossible for them to even think that they own their own ground. The predicament that they are in though will eventually come to an end. For his sister numerous times asserts that "it's got to go","that's the only way" and "we have to try and get rid of it" in the hope that after Gregor, who by now has not only seized to be taken care of but has had his status diminished to an indefinite it, the family will finally earn its share of stability and order.
And order surely comes round for after Gregor dies Mr. Samsa is able to assert himself and drive out the foreign influence of the three tenants and save his home. In the final paragraph we see the family invigorated and rejuvenated after their ordeal. They are discussing their future plans after realizing that their present occupations might as well be sufficient for them. They have stepped out of the unstable economic situation and into the more stable state of each having independent means of subsistence. The family are outside of their home, the place where it all happened and are ready to "forget about all that old stuff". Grete is "blossoming into a well built and beautiful young lady", as if she has undergone an initiation into life that has required of her to sacrifice another one, even if it is her brother's.
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