Bloom’s

GUIDES
Franz Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
CURRENTLY AVAILABLE

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

All the Pretty Horses
Animal Farm
Beloved
Brave New World
The Catcher in the Rye
The Chosen
The Crucible
Cry, the Beloved Country
Death of a Salesman
Fahrenheit 451
The Glass Menagerie
The Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet
The Handmaid’s Tale
The House on Mango Street
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
The Iliad
Lord of the Flies
Macbeth
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
The Member of the Wedding
The Metamorphosis
Of Mice and Men
1984
The Odyssey
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Pride and Prejudice
Ragtime
Romeo and Juliet
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Snow Falling on Cedars
A Streetcar Named Desire
A Tale of Two Cities
The Things They Carried
To Kill a Mockingbird
 Bloom’s
GUIDES
Franz Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis

Edited & with an Introduction

by Harold Bloom
Bloom’s Guides: The Metamorphosis

Copyright ©2007 by Infobase Publishing

Introduction ©2007 by Harold Bloom

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in

any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For
information contact:

Chelsea House
An imprint of Infobase Publishing
132 West 31st Street
New York NY 10001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Franz Kafka’s The metamorphosis / Harold Bloom, editor.
p. cm. — (Bloom’s guides)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7910-9298-4 (hardcover)
1. Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924. Verwandlung. I. Bloom, Harold.
PT2621.A26V282 2007
833’.912—dc22 2006025342

Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in

bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales
promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at
(212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755.

You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at

http://www.chelseahouse.com

Contributing Editor: Aaron Tillman

Cover design by Takeshi Takahashi

Printed in the United States of America

Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the
time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some
addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no
longer be valid.
 Contents

Introduction 7
Biographical Sketch 29
The Story Behind the Story 32
List of Characters 35
Summary and Analysis 37
Critical Views 49
Mark M. Anderson on the Bug as Metaphor 49

Stanley Corngold on the Distortion of Metaphor 50

George Gibian Compares The Metamorphosis with
The Judgment 52
M. Elizabeth Macandrew on the Father/Son Reversal 54
Philip H. Rhein Compares Kafka with Artist Alfred Kubin 56
Michael Rowe on Themes in The Metamorphosis 59
Michael P. Ryan on the Name Samsa 62
Mark Spilka on Kafka’s Predecessors 65
Peter Stine on Familial Relationships 69
Allen Thiher on Misrepresentation in The Metamorphosis 71

Works by Franz Kafka 74

Annotated Bibliography 75
Contributors 79
Acknowledgments 82
Index 84
 Introduction
HAROLD BLOOM

In her obituary for her lover, Franz Kafka, Milena Jesenská

sketched a modern Gnostic, a writer whose vision was of the
kenoma, the cosmic emptiness into which we have been thrown:

He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened by

life.... He saw the world as being full of invisible demons
which assail and destroy defenseless man.... All his works
describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions and
guiltless guilt in human beings.

Milena—brilliant, fearless, and loving—may have subtly

distorted Kafka’s beautifully evasive slidings between normative
Jewish and Jewish Gnostic stances. Max Brod, responding to
Kafka’s now-famous remark—“We are nihilistic thoughts that
came into God’s head”—explained to his friend the Gnostic
notion that the Demiurge had made this world both sinful and
evil. “No,” Kafka replied, “I believe we are not such a radical
relapse of God’s, only one of His bad moods. He had a bad
day.” Playing straight man, the faithful Brod asked if this meant
there was hope outside our cosmos. Kafka smiled, and
charmingly said: “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—
only not for us.”
Kafka, despite Gershom Scholem’s authoritative attempts to
claim him for Jewish Gnosticism, is both more and less than a
Gnostic, as we might expect. Yahweh can be saved, and the
divine degradation that is fundamental to Gnosticism is not an
element in Kafka’s world. But we were fashioned out of the clay
during one of Yahweh’s bad moods; perhaps there was divine
dyspepsia, or sultry weather in the garden that Yahweh had
planted in the East. Yahweh is hope, and we are hopeless. We
are the jackdaws or crows, the kafkas (since that is what the
name means, in Czech) whose impossibility is what the heavens

7
signify: “The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy
the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against
the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of
crows.”
In Gnosticism, there is an alien, wholly transcendent God,
and the adept, after considerable difficulties, can find the way
back to presence and fullness. Gnosticism therefore is a
religion of salvation, though the most negative of all such
saving visions. Kafkan spirituality offers no hope of salvation,
and so is not Gnostic. But Milena Jesenská certainly was right
to emphasize the Kafkan terror that is akin to Gnosticism’s
dread of the kenoma, which is the world governed by the
Archons. Kafka takes the impossible step beyond Gnosticism,
by denying that there is hope for us anywhere at all.
In the aphorisms that Brod rather misleadingly entitled
“Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope and The True Way,” Kafka
wrote: “What is laid upon us is to accomplish the negative; the
positive is already given.” How much Kabbalah Kafka knew is
not clear. Since he wrote a new Kabbalah, the question of
Jewish Gnostic sources can be set aside. Indeed, by what seems
a charming oddity (but I would call it yet another instance of
Blake’s insistence that forms of worship are chosen from poetic
tales), our understanding of Kabbalah is Kafkan anyway, since
Kafka profoundly influenced Gershom Scholem, and no one
will be able to get beyond Scholem’s creative or strong
misreading of Kabbalah for decades to come. I repeat this point
to emphasize its shock value: we read Kabbalah, via Scholem,
from a Kafkan perspective, even as we read human personality
and its mimetic possibilities by way of Shakespeare’s
perspectives, since essentially Freud mediates Shakespeare for
us, yet relies upon him nevertheless. A Kafkan facticity or
contingency now governs our awareness of whatever in Jewish
cultural tradition is other than normative.
In his diaries for 1922, Kafka meditated, on January 16,
upon “something very like a breakdown,” in which it was
“impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to
endure life, or, more exactly, the course of life.” The vessels
were breaking for him as his demoniac, writerly inner world

8
and the outer life “split apart, and they do split apart, or at least
clash in a fearful manner.” Late in the evening, K. arrives at the
village, which is deep in snow. The Castle is in front of him,
but even the hill upon which it stands is veiled in mist and
darkness, and there is not a single light visible to show that the
Castle was there. K. stands a long time on a wooden bridge that
leads from the main road to the village, while gazing, not at the
village, but “into the illusory emptiness above him,” where the
Castle should be. He does not know what he will always refuse
to learn, which is that the emptiness is “illusory” in every
possible sense, since he does gaze at the kenoma, which resulted
initially from the breaking of the vessels, the splitting apart of
every world, inner and outer.
Writing the vision of K., Kafka counts the costs of his
confirmation, in a passage prophetic of Scholem, but with a
difference that Scholem sought to negate by combining
Zionism and Kabbalah for himself. Kafka knew better, perhaps
only for himself, but perhaps for others as well:

Second: This pursuit, originating in the midst of men,

carries one in a direction away from them. The solitude
that for the most part has been forced on me, in part
voluntarily sought by me—but what was this if not
compulsion too?—is now losing all its ambiguity and
approaches its denouement. Where is it leading? The
strongest likelihood is that it may lead to madness; there
is nothing more to say, the pursuit goes right through me
and rends me asunder. Or I can—can I?—manage to keep
my feet somewhat and be carried along in the wild
pursuit. Where, then, shall I be brought? “Pursuit,”
indeed, is only a metaphor. I can also say, “assault on the
last earthly frontier,” an assault, moreover, launched from
below, from mankind, and since this too is a metaphor, I
can replace it by the metaphor of an assault from above,
aimed at me from above.
All such writing is an assault on the frontiers; if
Zionism had not intervened, it might easily have
developed into a new secret doctrine, a Kabbalah. There

9
 are intimations of this. Though of course it would require
genius of an unimaginable kind to strike root again in the
old centuries, or create the old centuries anew and not
spend itself withal, but only then begin to flower forth.

Consider Kafka’s three metaphors, which he so knowingly

substitutes for one another. The pursuit is of ideas, in that
mode of introspection which is Kafka’s writing. Yet this
metaphor of pursuit is also a piercing “right through me” and a
breaking apart of the self. For “pursuit,” Kafka then substitutes
mankind’s assault, from below, on the last earthly frontier.
What is that frontier? It must lie between us and the heavens.
Kafka, the crow or jackdaw, by writing, transgresses the
frontier and implicitly maintains that he could destroy the
heavens. By another substitution, the metaphor changes to “an
assault from above, aimed at me from above,” the aim simply
being the signifying function of the heavens, which is to mean
the impossibility of Kafkas or crows. The heavens assault Kafka
through his writing; “all such writing is an assault on the
frontiers,” and these must now be Kafka’s own frontiers. One
thinks of Freud’s most complex “frontier concept,” more
complex even than the drive: the bodily ego. The heavens
assault Kafka’s bodily ego, but only through his own writing.
Certainly such an assault is not un-Jewish, and has as much to
do with normative as with esoteric Jewish tradition.
Yet, according to Kafka, his own writing, were it not for the
intervention of Zionism, might easily have developed into a
new Kabbalah. How are we to understand that curious
statement about Zionism as the blocking agent that prevents
Franz Kafka from becoming another Isaac Luria? Kafka darkly
and immodestly writes: “There are intimations of this.” Our
teacher Gershom Scholem governs our interpretation here, of
necessity. Those intimations belong to Kafka alone, or perhaps
to a select few in his immediate circle. They cannot be
conveyed to Jewry, even to its elite, because Zionism has taken
the place of messianic Kabbalah, including presumably the
heretical Kabbalah of Nathan of Gaza, prophet of Sabbatai Zvi
and of all his followers down to the blasphemous Jacob Frank.

10
Kafka’s influence upon Scholem is decisive here, for Kafka
already has arrived at Scholem’s central thesis of the link
between the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the messianism of the
Sabbatarians and Frankists, and the political Zionism that gave
rebirth to Israel.
Kafka goes on, most remarkably, to disown the idea that he
possesses “genius of an unimaginable kind,” one that either
would strike root again in archaic Judaism, presumably of the
esoteric sort, or more astonishingly “create the old centuries
anew,” which Scholem insisted Kafka had done. But can we
speak, as Scholem tried to speak, of the Kabbalah of Franz
Kafka? Is there a new secret doctrine in the superb stories and
the extraordinary parables and paradoxes, or did not Kafka
spend his genius in the act of new creation of the old Jewish
centuries? Kafka certainly would have judged himself harshly as
one spent withal, rather than as a writer who “only then began
to flower forth.” Kafka died only two and a half years after this
meditative moment, died, alas, just before his forty-first
birthday. Yet as the propounder of a new Kabbalah, he had
gone very probably as far as he (or anyone else) could go. No
Kabbalah, be it that of Moses de Leon, Isaac Luria, Moses
Cordovero, Nathan of Gaza or Gershom Scholem, is exactly
easy to interpret, but Kafka’s secret doctrine, if it exists at all, is
designedly uninterpretable. My working principle in reading
Kafka is to observe that he did everything possible to evade
interpretation, which only means that what most needs and
demands interpretation in Kafka’s writing is its perversely
deliberate evasion of interpretation. Erich Heller’s formula for
getting at this evasion is: “Ambiguity has never been
considered an elemental force; it is precisely this in the stories
of Franz Kafka.” Perhaps, but evasiveness is not the same
literary quality as ambiguity.
Evasiveness is purposive; it writes between the lines, to
borrow a fine trope from Leo Strauss. What does it mean when
a quester for a new Negative, or perhaps rather a revisionist of
an old Negative, resorts to the evasion of every possible
interpretation as his central topic or theme? Kafka does not
doubt guilt, but wishes to make it “possible for men to enjoy

11
sin without guilt, almost without guilt,” by reading Kafka. To
enjoy sin almost without guilt is to evade interpretation, in
exactly the dominant Jewish sense of interpretation. Jewish
tradition, whether normative or esoteric, never teaches you to
ask Nietzsche’s question: “Who is the interpreter, and what
power does he seek to gain over the text?” Instead, Jewish
tradition asks: “Is the interpreter in the line of those who seek
to build a hedge about the Torah in every age?” Kafka’s power
of evasiveness is not a power over his own text, and it does
build a hedge about the Torah in our age. Yet no one before
Kafka built up that hedge wholly out of evasiveness, not even
Maimonides or Judah Halevi or even Spinoza. Subtlest and
most evasive of all writers, Kafka remains the severest and most
harassing of the belated sages of what will yet become the
Jewish cultural tradition of the future.

II

The jackdaw or crow or Kafka is also the weird figure of the

great hunter Gracchus (whose Latin name also means a crow),
who is not alive but dead, yet who floats, like one living, on his
death-bark forever. When the fussy Burgomaster of Riva knits
his brow, asking: “And you have no part in the other world (das
Jenseits)?”, the Hunter replies, with grand defensive irony:

I am forever on the great stair that leads up to it. On that

infinitely wide and spacious stair I clamber about,
sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes on the right,
sometimes on the left, always in motion. The Hunter has
been turned into a butterfly. Do not laugh.

Like the Burgomaster, we do not laugh. Being a single crow,

Gracchus would be enough to destroy the heavens, but he will
never get there. Instead, the heavens signify his impossibility,
the absence of crows or hunters, and so he has been turned into
another butterfly, which is all we can be, from the perspective
of the heavens. And we bear no blame for that:

12
 “I had been glad to live and I was glad to die. Before I
stepped aboard, I joyfully flung away my wretched load of
ammunition, my knapsack, my hunting rifle that I had
always been proud to carry, and I slipped into my winding
sheet like a girl into her marriage dress. I lay and waited.
Then came the mishap.”
“A terrible fate,” said the Burgomaster, raising his hand
defensively. “And you bear no blame for it?”
“None,” said the hunter. “I was a hunter; was there any
sin in that? I followed my calling as a hunter in the Black
Forest, where there were still wolves in those days. I lay in
ambush, shot, hit my mark, flayed the skin from my
victims: was there any sin in that? My labors were blessed.
‘The Great Hunter of Black Forest’ was the name I was
given. Was there any sin in that?”
“I am not called upon to decide that,” said the
Burgomaster, “but to me also there seems to be no sin in
such things. But then, whose is the guilt?”
“The boatman’s,” said the Hunter. “Nobody will read
what I say here, no one will come to help me; even if all
the people were commanded to help me, every door and
window would remain shut, everybody would take to bed
and draw the bedclothes over his head, the whole earth
would become an inn for the night. And there is sense in
that, for nobody knows of me, and if anyone knew he
would not know where I could be found, and if he knew
where I could be found, he would not know how to deal
with me, he would not know how to help me. The
thought of helping me is an illness that has to be cured by
taking to one’s bed.”

How admirable Gracchus is, even when compared to the

Homeric heroes! They know, or think they know, that to be
alive, however miserable, is preferable to being the foremost
among the dead. But Gracchus wished only to be himself,
happy to be a hunter when alive, joyful to be a corpse when
dead: “I slipped into my winding sheet like a girl into her

13
marriage dress.” So long as everything happened in good order,
Gracchus was more than content. The guilt must be the
boatman’s, and may not exceed mere incompetence. Being dead
and yet still articulate, Gracchus is beyond help: “The thought
of helping me is an illness that has to be cured by taking to
one’s bed.”
When he gives the striking trope of the whole earth closing
down like an inn for the night, with the bedclothes drawn over
everybody’s head, Gracchus renders the judgment: “And there
is sense in that.” There is sense in that only because in Kafka’s
world as in Freud’s, or in Scholem’s, or in any world deeply
informed by Jewish memory, there is necessarily sense in
everything, total sense, even though Kafka refuses to aid you in
getting at or close to it.
But what kind of a world is that, where there is sense in
everything, where everything seems to demand interpretation?
There can be sense in everything, as J. H. Van den Berg once
wrote against Freud’s theory of repression, only if everything is
already in the past and there never again can be anything
wholly new. That is certainly the world of the great normative
rabbis of the second century of the Common Era, and
consequently it has been the world of most Jews ever since.
Torah has been given, Talmud has risen to complement and
interpret it, other interpretations in the chain of tradition are
freshly forged in each generation, but the limits of Creation
and of Revelation are fixed in Jewish memory. There is sense in
everything because all sense is present already in the Hebrew
Bible, which by definition must be totally intelligible, even if its
fullest intelligibility will not shine forth until the Messiah
comes.
Gracchus, hunter and jackdaw, is Kafka, pursuer of ideas and
jackdaw, and the endless, hopeless voyage of Gracchus is
Kafka’s passage, only partly through a language not his own,
and largely through a life not much his own. Kafka was
studying Hebrew intensively while he wrote “The Hunter
Gracchus,” early in 1917, and I think we may call the voyages
of the dead but never-buried Gracchus a trope for Kafka’s
belated study of his ancestral language. He was still studying

14
Hebrew in the spring of 1923, with his tuberculosis well
advanced, and down to nearly the end he longed for Zion,
dreaming of recovering his health and firmly grounding his
identity by journeying to Palestine. Like Gracchus, he
experienced life-in-death, though unlike Gracchus he achieved
the release of total death.
“The Hunter Gracchus” as a story or extended parable is not
the narrative of a Wandering Jew or Flying Dutchman, because
Kafka’s trope for his writing activity is not so much a
wandering or even a wavering, but rather a repetition,
labyrinthine and burrow-building. His writing repeats, not
itself, but a Jewish esoteric interpretation of Torah that Kafka
himself scarcely knows, or even needs to know. What this
interpretation tells Kafka is that there is no written Torah but
only an oral one. However, Kafka has no one to tell him what
this Oral Torah is. He substitutes his own writing therefore for
the Oral Torah not made available to him. He is precisely in
the stance of the Hunter Gracchus, who concludes by saying,
“‘I am here, more than that I do not know, further than that I
cannot go. My ship has no rudder, and it is driven by the wind
that blows in the undermost regions of death.’”

III

“What is the Talmud if not a message from the distance?”,

Kafka wrote to Robert Klopstock, on December 19, 1932.
What was all of Jewish tradition, to Kafka, except a message
from an endless distance? That is surely part of the burden of
the famous parable, “An Imperial Message,” which concludes
with you, the reader, sitting at your window when evening falls
and dreaming to yourself the parable—that God, in his act of
dying, has sent you an individual message. Heinz Politzer read
this as a Nietzschean parable, and so fell into the trap set by the
Kafkan evasiveness:

Describing the fate of the parable in a time depleted of

metaphysical truths, the imperial message has turned into
the subjective fantasy of a dreamer who sits at a window

15
 with a view on a darkening world. The only real
information imported by this story is the news of the
Emperor’s death. This news Kafka took over from
Nietzsche.

No, for even though you dream the parable, the parable
conveys truth. The Talmud does exist; it really is an Imperial
message from the distance. The distance is too great; it cannot
reach you; there is hope, but not for you. Nor is it so clear that
God is dead. He is always dying, yet always whispers a message
into the angel’s ear. It is said to you that: “Nobody could fight
his way through here even with a message from a dead man,”
but the Emperor actually does not die in the text of the parable.
Distance is part of Kafka’s crucial notion of the Negative,
which is not a Hegelian nor a Heideggerian Negative, but is
very close to Freud’s Negation and also to the Negative
imaging carried out by Scholem’s Kabbalists. But I want to
postpone Kafka’s Jewish version of the Negative until later.
“The Hunter Gracchus” is an extraordinary text, but it is not
wholly characteristic of Kafka at his strongest, at his uncanniest
or most sublime.
When he is most himself, Kafka gives us a continuous
inventiveness and originality that rivals Dante, and truly
challenges Proust and Joyce as that of the dominant Western
author of our century, setting Freud aside, since Freud
ostensibly is science and not narrative or mythmaking, though
if you believe that, then you can be persuaded of anything.
Kafka’s beast fables are rightly celebrated, but his most
remarkable fabulistic being is neither animal nor human, but is
little Odradek, in the curious sketch, less than a page and a half
long, “The Cares of a Family Man,” where the title might have
been translated: “The Sorrows of a Paterfamilias.” The family
man narrates these five paragraphs, each a dialectical lyric in
itself, beginning with one that worries the meaning of the
name:

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try

to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to

16
 be of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The
uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume
with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither
of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word.

This evasiveness was overcome by the scholar Wilhelm

Emrich, who traced the name Odradek to the Czech word
odraditi, meaning to dissuade anyone from doing anything.
Like Edward Gorey’s Doubtful Guest, Odradek is uninvited yet
will not leave, since implicitly he dissuades you from doing
anything about his presence, or rather something about his
very uncanniness advises you to let him alone:

No one, of course, would occupy himself with such

studies if there were not a creature called Odradek. At
first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread,
and indeed it does seem to have thread wound upon it; to
be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread,
knotted and tangled together, of the most varied sorts and
colors. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden
crossbar sticks out of the middle of the star, and another
small rod is joined to that at a right angle. By means of
this latter rod on one side and one of the points of the star
on the other, the whole thing can stand upright as if on
two legs.

Is Odradek a “thing,” as the bemused family man begins by

calling him, or is he not a childlike creature, a daemon at home
in the world of children? Odradek clearly was made by an
inventive and humorous child, rather in the spirit of the
making of Adam out of the moistened red clay by the J writer’s
Yahweh. It is difficult not to read Odradek’s creation as a
deliberate parody when we are told that “the whole thing can
stand upright as if on two legs,” and again when the suggestion
is ventured that Odradek, like Adam, “once had some sort of
intelligible shape and is now only a broken-down remnant.” If
Odradek is fallen, he is still quite jaunty, and cannot be closely
scrutinized, since he “is extraordinarily nimble and can never

17
be laid hold of,” like the story in which he appears. Odradek
not only advises you not to do anything about him, but in some
clear sense he is yet another figure by means of whom Kafka
advises you against interpreting Kafka.
One of the loveliest moments in all of Kafka comes when
you, the paterfamilias, encounter Odradek leaning directly
beneath you against the banisters. Being inclined to speak to
him, as you would to a child, you receive a surprise: “ ‘ Well,
what’s your name?’ you ask him. ‘Odradek,’ he says. ‘And
where do you live?’ ‘No fixed abode,’ he says and laughs; but it
is only the kind of laughter that has no lungs behind it. It
sounds rather like the rustling of fallen leaves.”
“The ‘I’ is another,” Rimbaud once wrote, adding: “So much
the worse for the wood that finds it is a violin.” So much the
worse for the wood that finds it is Odradek. He laughs at being
a vagrant, if only by the bourgeois definition of having “no
fixed abode,” but the laughter, not being human, is uncanny.
And so he provokes the family man to an uncanny reflection,
which may be a Kafkan parody of Freud’s death drive beyond
the pleasure principle:

I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to

him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had
some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has
worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to
suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the
stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before
the feet of my children? He does no harm to anyone that
I can see, but the idea that he is likely to survive me I find
almost painful.

The aim of life, Freud says, is death, is the return of the

organic to the inorganic, supposedly our earlier state of being.
Our activity wears out, and so we die because, in an uncanny
sense, we wish to die. But Odradek, harmless and charming, is
a child’s creation, aimless, and so not subject to the death drive.
Odradek is immortal, being daemonic, and he represents also a
Freudian return of the repressed, of something repressed in the

18
paterfamilias, something from which the family man is in
perpetual flight. Little Odradek is precisely what Freud calls a
cognitive return of the repressed, while (even as) a complete
affective repression is maintained. The family man introjects
Odradek intellectually, but totally projects him affectively.
Odradek, I now suggest, is best understood as Kafka’s
synecdoche for Verneinung; Kafka’s version (not altogether un-
Freudian) of Jewish Negation, a version I hope to adumbrate in
what follows.

IV

Why does Kafka have so unique a spiritual authority?

Perhaps the question should be rephrased. What kind of
spiritual authority does Kafka have for us or why are we moved
or compelled to read him as one who has such authority? Why
invoke the question of authority at all? Literary authority,
however we define it, has no necessary relation to spiritual
authority, and to speak of a spiritual authority in Jewish writing
anyway always has been to speak rather dubiously. Authority is
not a Jewish concept but a Roman one, and so makes perfect
contemporary sense in the context of the Roman Catholic
Church, but little sense in Jewish matters, despite the squalors
of Israeli politics and the flaccid pieties of American Jewish
nostalgias. There is no authority without hierarchy, and
hierarchy is not a very Jewish concept either. We do not want
the rabbis, or anyone else, to tell us what or who is or is not
Jewish. The masks of the normative conceal not only the
eclecticism of Judaism and of Jewish culture, but also the
nature of the J writer’s Yahweh himself. It is absurd to think of
Yahweh as having mere authority. He is no Roman godling
who augments human activities, nor a Homeric god helping to
constitute an audience for human heroism.
Yahweh is neither a founder nor an onlooker, though
sometimes he can be mistaken for either or both. His essential
trope is fatherhood rather than foundation, and his
interventions are those of a covenanter rather than of a
spectator. You cannot found an authority upon him, because his

19
benignity is manifested not through augmentation but through
creation. He does not write; he speaks, and he is heard, in time,
and what he continues to create by his speaking is olam, time
without boundaries, which is more than just an augmentation.
More of anything else can come through authority, but more
life is the blessing itself, and comes, beyond authority, to
Abraham, to Jacob, and to David. No more than Yahweh, do
any of them have mere authority. Yet Kafka certainly does have
literary authority, and in a troubled way his literary authority is
now spiritual also, particularly in Jewish contexts. I do not
think that this is a post-Holocaust phenomenon, though Jewish
Gnosticism, oxymoronic as it may or may not be, certainly
seems appropriate to our time, to many among us. Literary
Gnosticism does not seem to me a time-bound phenomenon,
anyway. Kafka’s The Castle, as Erich Heller has argued, is
clearly more Gnostic than normative in is spiritual temper, but
then so is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Blake’s The Four Zoas, and
Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. We sense a Jewish element in Kafka’s
apparent Gnosticism, even if we are less prepared than
Scholem was to name it as a new Kabbalah. In his 1922 Diaries,
Kafka subtly insinuated that even his espousal of the Negative
was dialectical:

The Negative alone, however strong it may be, cannot

suffice, as in my unhappiest moments I believe it can. For
if I have gone the tiniest step upward, won any, be it the
most dubious kind of security for myself, I then stretch
out on my step and wait for the Negative, not to climb up
to me, indeed, but to drag me down from it. Hence it is a
defensive instinct in me that won’t tolerate my having the
slightest degree of lasting ease and smashes the marriage
bed, for example, even before it has been set up.

What is the Kafkan Negative, whether in this passage or

elsewhere? Let us begin by dismissing the Gallic notion that
there is anything Hegelian about it, any more than there is
anything Hegelian about the Freudian Verneinung. Kafka’s
Negative, unlike Freud’s, is uneasily and remotely descended

20
from the ancient tradition of negative theology, and perhaps
even from that most negative of ancient theologies,
Gnosticism, and yet Kafka, despite his yearnings for
transcendence, joins Freud in accepting the ultimate authority
of the fact. The given suffers no destruction in Kafka or in
Freud, and this given essentially is the way things are, for
everyone, and for the Jews in particular. If fact is supreme, then
the mediation of the Hegelian Negative becomes an absurdity,
and no destructive use of such a Negative is possible, which is
to say that Heidegger becomes impossible, and Derrida, who is
a strong misreading of Heidegger, becomes quite unnecessary.
The Kafkan Negative most simply is his Judaism, which is to
say the spiritual form of Kafka’s self-conscious Jewishness, as
exemplified in that extraordinary aphorism: “What is laid upon
us is to accomplish the negative; the positive is already given.”
The positive here is the Law or normative Judaism; the
negative is not so much Kafka’s new Kabbalah, as it is that
which is still laid upon us: the Judaism of the Negative, of the
future as it is always rushing towards us.
His best biographer to date, Ernst Pawel, emphasizes Kafka’s
consciousness “of his identity as a Jew, not in the religious, but
in the national sense.” Still, Kafka was not a Zionist, and
perhaps he longed not so much for Zion as for a Jewish
language, be it Yiddish or Hebrew. He could not see that his
astonishing stylistic purity in German was precisely his way of
not betraying his self-identity as a Jew. In his final phase, Kafka
thought of going to Jerusalem, and again intensified his study
of Hebrew. Had he lived, he would probably have gone to
Zion, perfected a vernacular Hebrew, and given us the
bewilderment of Kafkan parables and stories in the language of
the J writer and of Judah Halevi.

What calls out for interpretation in Kafka is his refusal to be

interpreted, his evasiveness even in the realm of his own
Negative. Two of his most beautifully enigmatical
performances, both late, are the parable, “The Problem of Our

21
Laws,” and the story or testament “Josephine the Singer and
the Mouse Folk.” Each allows a cognitive return of Jewish
cultural memory, while refusing the affective identification that
would make either parable or tale specifically Jewish in either
historical or contemporary identification. “The Problem of
Our Laws” is set as a problem in the parable’s first paragraph:

Our laws are not generally known; they are kept secret by
the small group of nobles who rule us. We are convinced
that these ancient laws are scrupulously administered;
nevertheless it is an extremely painful thing to be ruled by
laws that one does not know. I am not thinking of possible
discrepancies that may arise in the interpretation of the
laws, or of the disadvantages involved when only a few
and not the whole people are allowed to have a say in
their interpretation. These disadvantages are perhaps of
no great importance. For the laws are very ancient; their
interpretation has been the work of centuries, and has
itself doubtless acquired the status of law; and though
there is still a possible freedom of interpretation left, it
has now become very restricted. Moreover the nobles
have obviously no cause to be influenced in their
interpretation by personal interests inimical to us, for the
laws were made to the advantage of the nobles from the
very beginning, they themselves stand above the laws, and
that seems to be why the laws were entrusted exclusively
into their hands. Of course, there is wisdom in that—who
doubts the wisdom of the ancient laws?—but also
hardship for us; probably that is unavoidable.

In Judaism, the Law is precisely what is generally known,

proclaimed, and taught by the normative sages. The Kabbalah
was secret doctrine, but increasingly was guarded not by the
normative rabbis, but by Gnostic sectaries, Sabbatarians, and
Frankists, all of them ideologically descended from Nathan of
Gaza, Sabbatai Zvi’s prophet. Kafka twists askew the relations
between normative and esoteric Judaism, again making a
synecdochal representation impossible. It is not the rabbis or

22
normative sages who stand above the Torah but the minim, the
heretics from Elisha ben Abuyah through to Jacob Frank, and
in some sense, Gershom Scholem as well. To these Jewish
Gnostics, as the parable goes on to insinuate: “The Law is
whatever the nobles do.” So radical a definition tells us “that
the tradition is far from complete,” and that a kind of messianic
expectation is therefore necessary. This view, so comfortless as
far as the present is concerned, is lightened only by the belief
that a time will eventually come when the tradition and our
research into it will jointly reach their conclusion, and as it
were gain a breathing space, when everything will have become
clear, the law will belong to the people, and the nobility will
vanish.
If the parable at this point were to be translated into early
Christian terms, then “the nobility” would be the Pharisees,
and “the people” would be the Christian believers. But Kafka
moves rapidly to stop such a translation: “This is not
maintained in any spirit of hatred against the nobility; not at
all, and by no one. We are more inclined to hate ourselves,
because we have not yet shown ourselves worthy of being
entrusted with the laws.”
“We” here cannot be either Christians or Jews. Who then
are those who “have not yet shown ourselves worthy of being
entrusted with the laws”? They would appear to be the crows
or jackdaws again, a Kafka or a Hunter Gracchus, wandering
about in a state perhaps vulnerable to self-hatred or self-
distrust, waiting for a Torah that will not be revealed.
Audaciously, Kafka then concludes with overt paradox:

Actually one can express the problem only in a sort of

paradox: Any party that would repudiate not only all
belief in the laws, but the nobility as well, would have the
whole people behind it; yet no such party can come into
existence, for nobody would dare to repudiate the
nobility. We live on this razor’s edge. A writer once
summed the matter up in this way: The sole visible and
indubitable law that is imposed upon us is the nobility,
and must we ourselves deprive ourselves of that one law?

23
 Why would no one dare to repudiate the nobility, whether
we read them as normative Pharisees, Jewish Gnostic
heresiarchs, or whatever? Though imposed upon us, the sages
or the minim are the only visible evidence of law that we have.
Who are we then? How is the parable’s final question, whether
open or rhetorical, to be answered? “Must we ourselves deprive
ourselves of that one law?” Blake’s answer, in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell, was: “One Law for the Lion and the Ox is
Oppression.” But what is one law for the crows? Kafka will not
tell us whether it is oppression or not.
Josephine the singer also is a crow or Kafka, rather than a
mouse, and the folk may be interpreted as an entire nation of
jackdaws. The spirit of the Negative, dominant if uneasy in
“The Problem of Our Laws,” is loosed into a terrible freedom
in Kafka’s testamentary story. That is to say: in the parable, the
laws could not be Torah, though that analogue flickered near.
But in Josephine’s story, the mouse folk simultaneously are and
are not the Jewish people, and Franz Kafka both is and is not
their curious singer. Cognitively the identifications are
possible, as though returned from forgetfulness, but affectively
they certainly are not, unless we can assume that crucial aspects
making up the identifications have been purposefully, if other
than consciously, forgotten. Josephine’s piping is Kafka’s story,
and yet Kafka’s story is hardly Josephine’s piping.
Can there be a mode of negation neither conscious nor
unconscious, neither Hegelian nor Freudian? Kafka’s genius
provides one, exposing many shades between consciousness and
the work of repression, many demarcations far ghostlier than
we could have imagined without him. Perhaps the ghostliest
come at the end of the story:

Josephine’s road, however, must go downhill. The time

will soon come when her last notes sound and die into
silence. She is a small episode in the eternal history of our
people, and the people will get over the loss of her. Not
that it will be easy for us; how can our gatherings take
place in utter silence? Still, were they not silent even
when Josephine was present? Was her actual piping

24
 notably louder and more alive than the memory of it will
be? Was it even in her lifetime more than a simply
memory? Was it not rather because Josephine’s singing
was already past losing in this way that our people in their
wisdom prized it so highly?
So perhaps we shall not miss so very much after all,
while Josephine, redeemed from the earthly sorrows
which to her thinking lay in wait for all chosen spirits, will
happily lose herself in the numberless throng of the
heroes of our people, and soon, since we are no
historians, will rise to the heights of redemption and be
forgotten like all her brothers.

“I am a Memory come alive,” Kafka wrote in the Diaries.

Whether or not he intended it, he was Jewish memory come
alive. “Was it even in her lifetime more than a simple
memory?” Kafka asks, knowing that he too was past losing.
The Jews are no historians, in some sense, because Jewish
memory, as Yosef Yerushalmi has demonstrated, is a normative
mode and not a historical one. Kafka, if he could have prayed,
might have prayed to rise to the heights of redemption and be
forgotten like most of his brothers and sisters. But his prayer
would not have been answered. When we think of the Catholic
writer, we think of Dante, who nevertheless had the audacity to
enshrine his Beatrice in the hierarchy of Paradise. If we think
of the Protestant writer, we think of Milton, a party or sect of
one, who believed that the soul was mortal, and would be
resurrected only in conjunction with the body. Think of the
Jewish writer, and you must think of Kafka, who evaded his
own audacity, and believed nothing, and trusted only in the
Covenant of being a writer.

VI

What can it mean to trust in the Covenant, not between

Yahweh and the Jewish people, but between writing and a
writer? Gregor Samsa is a solitary (his last name, in Czech, can
be translated “I am alone”), commercial traveler, and a kind of

25
family pariah or outcast, at least in his own tormented vision.
His celebrated metamorphosis, into a kind of huge bedbug, is
completed in the story’s first sentence. Gregor’s fate is certain
but without hope; there is plenty of hope, for writing as for
God, but none for Gregor. The Law, which is the way things
are, including one’s parents’ huge debt to one’s employer, is
essentially a universal compulsion to repeat. No irony, however
well handled, can represent repetition compulsion as the Law
of the Jews. Samsa’s employer is therefore not Yahweh, but
another version of the Gnostic Demiurge, ruler of the
cosmological emptiness in which we dwell.
The only rage to order that Kafka knew was his implicit rage
not to be interpreted. There can be no ultimate coherence to
my Gnostic interpretation (nor for Scholem’s, nor Benjamin’s,
nor Heller’s, nor to anyone’s) because Kafka refuses the
Gnostic quest for the alien God, for one’s own spark or pneuma
rejoining the original Abyss somewhere out of this world. The
huge bedbug is neither the fallen husk of Samsa nor his
potentially saving pneuma. It can hardly be his spark from the
original Abyss because it is a horrible vermin, and yet only after
his transformation into a bug is Gregor capable of aesthetic
apprehension. Like Shakespeare’s grotesque Caliban, the insect
Samsa hears the beautiful in music, and so for the first time
apprehends another sphere. Kafka refused an illustration for
The Metamorphosis that would have portrayed Gregor Samsa as
a literal beetle or bedbug: “The insect itself cannot be drawn. It
cannot be drawn even as if seen from a distance.” This is not to
say that Samsa suffers an hallucination, but only reminds us
that a negation cannot be visually represented, which in turn
reminds us of Kafkan nostalgias for the Second
Commandment.
Is Gregor accurate in his final consciousness that his death is
a liberation, an act of love for his family? Wilhelm Emrich,
elsewhere so wary a Kafka exegete, fell into this momentary
passion for the positive, an entrapment all readers of Kafka
suffer sooner or later, so exhausted are we by this greatest
master of evasions. Because the insect is inexplicable, it does
not necessarily contain any truth. The Metamorphosis, like all

26
crucial Kafkan narratives, takes place somewhere between truth
and meaning, a “somewhere” identical with the modern Jewish
rupture from the normative tradition. Truth is in hope and
neither is available to us, while meaning is in the future or the
messianic age, and we will not come up to either. We are lazy,
but industry will not avail us either, not even the industrious
zeal with which every writer prides himself upon accepting his
own death. If the Metamorphosis is a satire, then it is self-satire,
or post-Nietzschean parody, that humiliates Kafka’s only
covenant, the placing of trust in the transcendental possibility
of being a strong writer.
The story then cannot be interpreted coherently as a fantasy
of death and resurrection, or as an allegory on the less-is-more
fate of being a writer. Gregor’s death is not an effectual
sacrifice, not a self-fulfillment, and not even a tragic irony of
any kind. It is another Kafkan negation that refuses to negate
the given, which is the world of Freud’s reality principle.
Gregor does not become a child again as he dies. Yet we cannot
even call him a failure, which might guarantee his upward fall
to heights of redemption. Like Gracchus, like the bucket-rider,
like the country doctor, like the hunger artist, Gregor is
suspended between the truth of the past, or Jewish memory,
and the meaning of the future, or Jewish messianism. Poor
Gregor therefore evades the categories both of belief and of
poetry. How much would most of us know about this rupture
without Kafka, or Kafka’s true heir, Beckett?
A Gnosticism without transcendence is not a knowing but is
something else, and there is no transcendence in the
Metamorphosis, or anywhere in Kafka. To transcend in a world
of rupture you only need to change your direction, but that is
to adopt the stance of the cat (or Gnostic archon) of Kafka’s
magnificent and appalling parable, “A Little Fable”:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller

every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid,
I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I
saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long
walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last

27
 chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap
that I must run into.” “You only need to change your
direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
(Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir)

28
 Biographical Sketch
Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, the first child
of German-Jewish parents, Hermann and Julie Kafka. Franz’s
father, Hermann, owned a dry goods store and was portrayed
in Kafka’s “Letter to my Father” as a strict and largely
unsympathetic man. In 1885, Franz’s brother Georg was born,
but he died the following year. Two years later, another
brother Heinrich was born, but he too died within the same
year. Finally in September, 1889, around the same time that
Franz first entered a German elementary school, the first of his
three sisters, Gabriele, was born. The following year, his
second sister Valerie was born, and in 1892, his youngest sister
Ottilie was born. In 1893, Franz began attending the German
Gymnasium of Prague. He had his Bar Mitzvah in 1896 and
graduated from his German high school in 1901.
From 1901 to 1906, Kafka studied law at Charles Ferdinand
University, a German college in Prague. During his second
year, he met Max Brod who would become his closest
confidant, eventual biographer, and one of his translators.
While in school, Kafka began writing Description of a Struggle.
In 1906, he graduated with a degree in law and was soon hired
as a secretary in a law office.
The year after graduating from college, Kafka wrote
“Wedding Preparations in the Country,” and by the following
year, he had eight pieces of prose published in the literary
review Hyperion; these pieces would later appear in his first
book, Meditation. It was during this year, 1908, when Kafka
began working with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute,
where he would remain employed for the majority of his life. In
1909, the Prague newspaper Bohemia, published “The Aero-
planes at Brescia,” and over the course of the next year, they
published five more of Kafka’s prose pieces, all of which would
appear in Meditation.
In 1910 and 1911, Kafka traveled to Bohemia, France,
Germany, Switzerland and Italy with Max Brod. During his
travels, he developed a keen interest in Yiddish theater and

29
literature. 1912 was a fruitful year for Kafka who began work
on his first novel, Amerika, completed “The Judgment” and
“The Metamorphosis,” and met Felice Bauer, the woman
whom he would get engaged to twice, and to whom hundreds
of pages of letters would be written. The following year, his
book Meditation was finally published, as was “The Judgment”
and “The Stoker,” which later became the first chapter in his
novel Amerika.
Kafka first became engaged to Felice Bauer in 1914, but
later that year he broke it off. During this time, he wrote “The
Nature Theater of Oklahoma,” and “In the Penal Colony,” as
well as the final chapter to his novel Amerika, and the
beginning of his unfinished novel The Trial. The following
year, he reconciled with Felice Bauer and published “The
Metamorphosis.” In 1916, he wrote “The Hunter Gracchus,”
“A Country Doctor,” and a few other stories that would later
appear in his collection A Country Doctor. The following year,
he wrote “A Report to an Academy” and “The Great Wall of
China.” During this year, he became engaged once again to
Felice Bauer, but broke it off after being diagnosed with
Tuberculosis. His health issues continued, and after contracting
the Spanish Influenza on top of the existing Tuberculosis, he
was admitted into a sanatorium. In 1919, Kafka published “In
the Penal Colony” and the volume of stories A Country Doctor.
It was during this year that he wrote the posthumously
published but never delivered “Letter to His Father,” and
began his correspondence with Milena Jesenská who would
become his Czech translator and with whom he would have an
affair.
By 1921, Kafka made an attempt to return to work at the
Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, but retired the
following year due to sickness and fatigue. In 1922, he wrote
and published “A Hunger Artist” and began work on another
unfinished novel, The Castle. The following year, he met Dora
Diamant, a young Hassidic woman with whom he would spend
the last months of his life. Later that year he moved to Berlin
to live with Dora, and it was in Berlin where he wrote “The
Burrow” and became involved in Hebrew studies. During this

30
time his health was rapidly failing him. By 1924, he moved
back to Prague where he wrote “Josephine the Singer” and
entered a Sanatorium near Vienna where he made the final
corrections on his collection A Hunger Artist, and ultimately
died on June 3, 1924. Franz Kafka was buried on June 11,
1924, in a Jewish Cemetery in Prague. His collection Hunger
Artist was published not long after his death.

31
 The Story Behind the Story
In the ninety years since its publication, “The Metamorphosis”
has received an incredible amount of international scholarly
attention from a number of different academic angles. In her
essay “Transforming Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis,’ ” Nina
Pelikan Straus touches on this vast scholarship, suggesting that

The reasons for scholars’ interest in Kafka, particularly

his short masterpiece, “Metamorphosis,” reflect a
recognition on the part of students of religion,
philosophy, psychoanalysis, political and social criticism,
Marxism, and literature that Kafka’s work is inexhaustible.
No single interpretation invalidates or finally delivers the
story’s significance. Its quality of multivalency
(Vieldeutigkeit) keeps us talking to each other, against
each other, and to ourselves (Straus 651).1

In her own essay, Straus makes the case for viewing “The
Metamorphosis” through a feminist lens, focusing on Gregor’s
sister Grete, as well as Gregor’s acknowledgement of her
increasing vitality and independence.
Many scholars have suggested that “The Metamorphosis” is
an allegorical tale of oppression, making use of
autobiographical circumstances relating to the household
within which Kafka was raised––particularly his relationship
with his father––and the sickness and depression that Kafka
experienced throughout his life. Considerable attention has
also been paid to the startling originality of the story. In Mark
Spilka’s essay “Kafka’s Sources for The Metamorphosis,”
published in 1959 in Comparative Literature, he suggests that
“Gregor Samsa is not simply the young Kafka, as critics often
hold; he is also the young Dickens, the young Copperfield,
even the balding Golyadkin, who wants to dance with Klara
Olsufyevna, all synthesized into one regressive hero” (305).2 In
his essay, Spilka argues that “its blend of fantasy with urban
realism began with Gogol and Dostoevsky…and its central

32
situation, that of a son locked in his room and abhorred by his
own family, was first devised by Dickens” (290).3
Kafka wrote “The Metamorphosis” in 1912, an important and
productive year for Kafka who also completed “The Judgment,”
began work on his first novel, Amerika, and met Felice Bauer, the
woman to whom he would twice get engaged. Although “The
Metamorphosis”—not published until 1915—has received more
critical attention than any of his other stories, Stanley Corngold,
in his chapter “The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the
Metaphor” from his critical volume Franz Kafka: The Necessity of
Form, suggests that “Kafka never claimed for it any special
distinction” (Corngold 47).4 Corngold cites Kafka’s diaries in
which he laments “I am now reading Metamorphosis at home and
find it bad” (Kafka qtd. in Corngold 48)5. This is consistent with
the self-consciousness and even self-loathing that Kafka
experienced throughout his life, and gives credence to the long
heralded story that Kafka asked his closest friend Max
Brod––one of the biographers and translators of his work, as well
as the primary source for Kafka’s posthumously published
prose––to burn his manuscripts before he died.
Some scholars, such as Michael P. Ryan, have focused on “the
variety of suffering which plagued the life of Franz Kafka” (Ryan
133)6, suggesting that this played a part in the conception of
Gregor and the “The Metamorphosis.” In his essay “Samsa and
Samsara: Suffering, Death, and Rebirth in ‘The Metamorphosis,’”
Ryan cites Franz Kempf ’s view that “The Metamorphosis”
“depict[s] the ‘mercilessness of the world’” (133)7. Given the
difficulties that Kafka had with his father, his health and his job,
many critics have made the case that in “The Metamorphosis,”
Kafka was portraying a condition where one is treated and/or
views oneself as less than human––an animal, an insect.
Another of Kafka’s conditions that scholars have focused on
relates to his feelings of shame and guilt, particularly in relation
to his family. In his essay “Franz Kafka and Animals,” Peter
Stine suggests a connection between the use of animals––one
prominent example being the dung beetle––and Kafka’s veiled
portrayal of his family. Stine “speculate[s] that Kafka, in
turning to his family for subject matter, needed the animal

33
world for fear of violating his own sense of wholesomeness
while exploring under the rock of repression” (Stine 62) 8.
Kafka’s ability to successfully join the fantastic and the real is
often noted as being at the root of his genius.
The very nature of “The Metamorphosis,” a work that asks
its readers to accept that the protagonist has been
metamorphosed into a giant dung beetle, demands an
investigation of the story’s events that goes beyond the surface
features of plot. Since Kafka’s death in 1924, many letters,
diaries, pieces of fiction (finished and unfinished), parables,
nonfiction prose pieces and biographical writings have surfaced,
giving literary scholars ample material from which to speculate
about the origins of, and interpret the events within, the rich,
complex tale of “The Metamorphosis.” Kafka’s “Letter to His
Father” details a circumstance in which he is left outside and
treated as an animal, a concept that has been given life in a few
of Kafka’s fictions, including “The Metamorphosis.” When
thinking of the life and literary influences that informed Kafka’s
most essential work, it is important not to overlook the singular
degree of invention and imagination that ultimately allowed
Franz Kafka to write a story that still manages to delight,
inspire, and confound the minds of scholars, students, and a vast
international reading public.

Notes
1. Straus, Nina Pelikan. “Transforming Franz Kafka’s
‘Metamorphosis.’” In Signs, Vol.14, No.3 (Spring 1989): 651-667.
2. Spilka, Mark. “Kafka’s Sources for ‘The Metamorphosis.’ ” In
Comparative Literature, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1959): 289-307.
3. Ibid.
4. Corngold, Stanley. “The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the
Metaphor.” In Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1988, 47-89.
5. Ibid.
6. Ryan, Michael P. “Samsa and Samsara: Suffering, Death, and
Rebirth in ‘The Metamorphosis.’” In German Quarterly, 72.2 (Spring
1999): 133-152.
7. Ibid.
8. Stine, Peter. “Franz Kafka and Animals.” In Contemporary
Literature, Vol. 22, No.1 (Winter, 1981): 58-80.

34
 List of Characters
Gregor Samsa is the primary character in the story. He is a
commercial traveler (traveling salesman) who lives with his
parents and sister in a modest apartment. The story opens with
Gregor waking up late for work, only to find himself
transformed into a giant dung beetle. For the majority of the
story, he remains isolated in his room, an increasing burden on
his family who are forced to find jobs and take on lodgers to
make up for the income that Gregor had formerly provided. By
the end of the story, the family have all grown stronger and
more independent while Gregor, struggling in his
metamorphosed state, grows increasingly weak and eventually
dies.

Grete is Gregor’s younger sister and the closest family member

to him. Initially, she is the most sympathetic to Gregor’s
condition, taking on the responsibility of feeding him, but
eventually she begins to see Gregor as a burden, ultimately
advocating for his removal. By the end of the story, after
Gregor has died, it is clear that Grete has made the most
dramatic transformation: from a dependent, insecure girl, to an
attractive, independent woman.

Mr. Samsa (Gregor’s father) has spent the years leading up to

Gregor’s metamorphosis growing increasingly lethargic,
lamenting the collapse of his business, and forcing his son to be
the sole provider for the family. He is the most aggressive
toward the metamorphosed Gregor, once even pelting him
with apples. Forced back to work by Gregor’s inexplicable
condition, Mr. Samsa becomes a bank messenger and is
required to wear a uniform to work. After taking in some
lodgers to help pay the bills, Mr. Samsa shows his renewed
authority by kicking them out at the end.

Mrs. Samsa (Gregor’s mother) is deeply upset by her son’s

metamorphosis, fainting upon first sight of him, and even

35
toward the end, resisting her own daughter’s suggestion that
they remove the dung beetle (Gregor) from their home. She
also gets a job to help pay the bills, and following Gregor’s
death, develops a renewed sense of hope in the budding
prospects of her daughter.

The Chief clerk comes to the house on the day of Gregor’s

metamorphosis to see why he has failed to show up on time.
Before Gregor reveals his condition, the chief clerk responds to
Gregor’s refusal to open his door by ranting about Gregor’s
dissatisfactory performance at work. Once Gregor opens his
door, the chief clerk flees from the house, leaving his walking
cane behind.

The Charwoman is an older servant who is largely unaffected

by Gregor’s metamorphosis. She makes a point of peering into
his room everyday, playfully checking up on him. In the end,
she reveals that she has disposed of the dung beetle corpse and
that the Samsas won’t have to worry about him anymore.

The Three Lodgers come to stay at the Samsas’ home after

Gregor’s metamorphosis. They take advantage of the Samsas’
hospitality, at one point requesting that Grete play the violin
for them and then moving away from boredom and
dissatisfaction. When Gregor reveals himself to them, they
refuse to pay the Samsas any rent, but stay on in an effort to
exploit the conditions even further. Ultimately, Gregor’s father
kicks them out of the house.

Anna is the Samsas’ first housekeeper. She leaves just after

Gregor’s condition is revealed.

The Cook asks to leave the Samsas’ household once she

becomes aware of the metamorphosed Gregor. She promises to
keep his condition a secret.

36
 Summary and Analysis
Franz Kafka’s best-known story “The Metamorphosis” opens as
the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up in his bedroom, only
to discover that he has inexplicably metamorphosed into a giant
dung beetle. As Gregor struggles to coordinate the new facets
of his insect body, and come to terms with the fantastic reality
that has presented itself, it is revealed to the reader––through
Kafka’s third person narrative––that Gregor is a traveling
salesman who lives with his parents and younger sister inside a
modest apartment, for which Gregor’s salary is needed to pay
the bills. Gregor has never been satisfied by his work, but he is
burdened not only with the responsibility of rent and
household bills, but also with the difficult task of paying down
his parents’ debt, accumulated through the collapse of his
father’s business.
The narrative shifts closer to Gregor’s point of view as he
struggles with the more pedestrian reality that he is going to be
late for work, and that a confrontation with his boss will be
unavoidable. He considers calling in sick, but he doesn’t want
to arouse suspicion, “since during his five years’ employment
he had not been ill once,” (91)1 and he fears his illness would be
investigated. As he consumes himself with the predicament of
tardiness, his mother knocks on his door and inquires about his
situation. He answers in a voice “unmistakably his own…but
with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it” (91) that
he is getting up. Although his answer seems to satisfy his
mother, the fact that he is still home at this late hour of the
morning leads his father to bang on his bedroom door,
followed by his sister, who asks to be let in.
Gregor has no intention of letting anyone in as yet, setting
his mind to the reality of his metamorphosis, hoping that he is
only experiencing a temporary delusion and that before long,
he will be transformed back into his usual state. But as he tries
to get out of bed, he is faced with the daunting task of
coordinating the broad body and “numerous little legs” (92) of
an overgrown insect. His initial struggles to get out of bed

37
prove fruitless and painful, but he is determined to move before
the hour gets too late and someone from his office comes to
check on him. Although his attempt to rock his big body back
and forth move him closer to the edge of the bed, he is not able
to make it to the floor by the time the doorbell rings and the
chief clerk from his office is greeted by the Samsas’
servant––the servant being one of the early indications of the
comfort that Gregor’s hard work afforded his family. Gregor
laments to himself: “What a fate, to be condemned to work for
a firm where the smallest omission at once [gives] rise to the
gravest suspicion!” (94). It is the irritation at the chief clerk’s
arrival that gives Gregor the strength to heave himself out of
bed, landing hard on the bedroom floor.
Gregor’s sister and father each announce––through his
closed bedroom door––that the chief clerk has arrived, and the
clerk himself asks Gregor to open his door. When Gregor
doesn’t answer, his mother assures the clerk that Gregor’s not
well, and that nothing is as important to him as his work.
Finally Gregor claims that he’s coming, but doesn’t move, for
fear that he’ll miss what his family and his boss are discussing.
Gregor’s father asks that the chief clerk be allowed to enter, but
Gregor refuses, eliciting a sob from his sister. The chief clerk
demands to know what is wrong with Gregor, admonishing
him for his abnormal behavior. When Gregor does not
respond, the chief clerk suggests that Gregor’s work has not
been satisfactory and that his position is expendable. Gregor
responds with a series of pleas and excuses, claiming that he’s
not well and that he can still make it to the office, all while
working his body across the floor and attempting to prop
himself up against the chest of drawers.
After slipping a few times, he finally stabilizes himself long
enough to hear the chief clerk and his parents talking about
how unintelligible his words were. Gregor’s mother gets
increasingly upset, yelling for her daughter Grete to get the
doctor, insisting that Gregor is ill. Despite the fact that his
voice is no longer clear, Gregor is comforted by the effort his
family is making on his behalf. Deciding to make an earnest
attempt to allow the chief clerk in, he pushes his desk chair

38
toward the door, climbs on top and clamps his toothless, insect
jaw around the key in an effort to unlock the door. Although he
is pained by the effort, and some brown fluid dribbles out of his
mouth, he is successful in his attempt to unlock it.
When the door opens, the chief clerk and Gregor’s parents
are horrified by the inexplicable sight of the giant dung beetle:
Gregor’s mother faints and Gregor’s father begins to weep.
From Gregor’s vantage point, the reader is given a description
of the immediate surroundings, the details of which have
garnered some attention from scholars: through the window,
there is a dark gray hospital building seen through the heavy
rain outside; the breakfast table is set, and the reader is told of
Gregor’s father’s tendency to stretch the morning meal out for
hours over several newspapers; on the wall outside Gregor’s
room is a photo of him in a military outfit, “inviting one to
respect his uniform and military bearing” (101). The details
reveal the bleakness of the surroundings, as well as the rigid
authority that Gregor’s father once held, highlighting his
current tendency toward apathy, which has forced Gregor to be
the sole provider for the family.
Gregor tries to instigate conversation with the chief clerk,
suggesting that he still plans to get dressed and make his way to
the office, and despite the grind of traveling, he wouldn’t want
any other job. He pleads with the clerk to offer a favorable
account of the situation, insisting that his condition is only
temporary, that he will bounce back with greater force, and
that his parents and sister depend on him to work for the
family. As Gregor continues his plea, the chief clerk backs
slowly toward the front door of the Samsa home, finally
turning and running away as quickly as he’s able. Gregor knows
that he must stop the clerk from leaving if he has any hope of
holding on to his position, so in an awkward effort to
coordinate his new fleet of tiny legs, Gregor maneuvers out of
his room and sets out after the clerk, falling on his belly from
the urgency of the effort. Although he is comforted by his soft
landing and his ability to maintain some control over his vast
extremities––for a few yards at least––Gregor is jarred back to
reality by the frantic cries coming from his mother who has

39
backed into the kitchen table, causing the coffee pot to
overturn. Gregor tries to calm his mother who is
understandably frightened by the sight of a giant dung beetle
with flapping jaws.
Gregor’s mother finally runs into the arms of her husband
who grabs the walking stick that the chief clerk had left behind
and uses it to drive Gregor back toward his room. Gregor’s
mother opens a window and lets the cold air rush in while her
husband stamps his feet and Gregor does his best to walk
backward. Unable to control his backward direction, Gregor is
forced to turn around and concentrate on making it to his
room without disturbing his father more than necessary. When
he gets there, only one side of the entryway is open. Since he
can’t expect anyone to open the other side for him, he attempts
to leap through the narrow opening, lodging his bulky frame in
the doorway, fluids from his body running over the white door.
Part I concludes with a great push from his father, “a
deliverance” (105) that forces Gregor into his room,
punctuated by the slamming of his bedroom door.

Part II opens that evening as Gregor wakes from a deep sleep.

In an effort to see what is happening outside his room, he
crawls toward the door, nursing his left side, which is still in
considerable pain from his earlier entry into his room. When
he gets to his door, he is pleasantly surprised to find a tray of
food, most likely left by his sister. Despite his considerable
hunger, he is revolted by the smell and taste of the bread and
milk. Thoughts of food turn to a reflection on the relative
comfort that he had been able to provide for his family thus far;
but his positive thoughts quickly turn dark at the possibility
that his life might end in a ghastly way. To combat his anxiety,
he paces around the room, hoping that someone might come in
to see him. Eventually the light from the living room is turned
off, and Gregor hears his family members tip-toeing to their
rooms. Upset by the reality of the circumstances, Gregor
wedges his body beneath the couch, desperate for comfort.
Although hunger and anxiety prevent him from falling into a
deep sleep, Gregor is able to rest with adequate comfort until

40
the early morning when his sister opens his door and peers into
his room. At the sight of Gregor’s body, she slams the door
shut, opening it again a few moments later. Gregor watches
from beneath the couch as his sister creeps into the room. At
this point, the narrative dips into Gregor’s point of view as he
wonders: “Would she notice that he had left the milk standing,
and not out of hunger, and would she bring in some other kind
of food more to his taste?” (107). He resists the urge to throw
himself at her feet as he watches his sister take the tray out of
the room.
Much to Gregor’s surprise, Grete returns with an assortment
of food items, meant to determine what he might want, given
his current condition. She leaves the food on the floor and
retreats from the room, turning the key to indicate that he’ll
have adequate privacy. Gregor scampers out quickly and finds
himself drawn to the cheese, vegetables and sauce, but turned
off by the fresher items. After stuffing himself, his sister
returns, opening the door slowly enough to allow Gregor time
to hide beneath the couch. She gathers the remains into a
bucket and leaves. The reader is told that this is the pattern for
Gregor’s meals: two times a day––in the morning and in the
evening––brought in and picked up by his sister.
Since Gregor’s speech is unintelligible to his family
members, they do not attempt to speak to him, and he is forced
to gather any information he can by listening through the door.
He hears the cook’s teary request to quit, swearing that she
won’t utter a word about the situation in the house. When she
is finally relieved of her duty, Gregor’s sister Grete is forced to
take over the cooking duties. However the reader is told that
there isn’t much cooking for Grete to do since the family, in
particular Gregor’s mother, have not been eating much. Gregor
overhears his father divulging the state of the family’s finances,
pulling out various articles from his small safe, most left over
from the demise of his former business. The reader is told
explicitly that it was the failure of his father’s business that
forced Gregor to “work with unusual ardor and almost
overnight…become a commercial traveler” (110). Gregor’s
efforts in this capacity had been more than adequate, allowing

41
him to take care of the family’s expenses, and allowing his
family to take his efforts for granted—evidenced most
noticeably in the presence of a cleaning woman and a cook.
The reader is also made aware of Gregor’s closeness with his
sister, and of his “secret plan…that she, who loved
music…should be sent…to study at the Conservatorium” (111).
These plans, however, can not be realized in his current
condition. Although he is disheartened by his thwarted dream
for his sister, he is encouraged by the news––heard through the
door of his room––that a few investments had made it through
the collapse of his father’s business, and that a certain amount
of the money that he had brought home still remained.
But it is the thought of money that proves most distressing
for Gregor. Although what remains could last a year or two,
eventually someone will have to earn a salary, and Gregor can’t
imagine anyone in his family being able to work. This inability
to even conceive of his family working has been the source of
some literary scholarship that has focused on the parasitic
relationships that exist in the Samsa home: first the family on
Gregor, then Gregor on the family. Only with Gregor’s death
are the members of his family finally liberated, each achieving a
greater sense of vitality and independence. But before the
reader is taken to this stage, the current conditions are spelled
out: Gregor’s father hasn’t worked in five years and has grown
heavy, his mother has severe asthma, and his sister is only
seventeen and has not done serious work in her life.
In an effort to deal with his anxiety and shame regarding his
family’s situation, Gregor manages to push the chair in his
room near the window where he can crawl up and gaze outside.
At first this provides some comfort––serving as a reminder of
the freedom that exists in the world––but before long his vision
starts to change, and everything outside his window appears as
a large gray blur. His inability to see the outside world has also
been a focus of some writing on the story, the critical lens often
falling on the distortion that results from societal or even
familial oppression––this with the understanding that Gregor’s
metamorphosis is symbolic of an oppressive state. But at this
point in the story, Gregor’s sister is unaware of the change in

42
his vision, so recognizing that Gregor has pushed the chair
near the window, she makes a point––whenever tidying up––to
return the chair to its place.
His oppressive state is acknowledged explicitly when,
through Gregor’s close point of view, the reader is told “if he
could have spoken to [his sister] and thanked her for all she had
to do for him, he could have borne her ministrations better; as
it was, they oppressed him” (113). Gregor is also
uncomfortable by the fact that his sister has to open the
windows before she can do anything else, as if the smell of the
room is almost too revolting to bear. He is further upset when
his sister opens the door and sees him gazing out the window,
the sight causing her to slam the door closed, not returning
until the middle of the day. Gregor responds with tremendous
shame––a recurring theme throughout the story––laboring to
carry a sheet across the room so he can hide the parts of
himself that stick out from his hiding place beneath the couch.
At this point, the reader is told of how grateful Gregor’s
parents are for Grete’s efforts, “whereas formerly they had
frequently scolded her for being as they thought a somewhat
useless daughter” (114). Gregor often hears the conversations
that follow his sister’s visits to his room, most of which concern
his condition. Eventually, however, the conversations turn to
his mother’s desire to enter the room, and his father and sister’s
protestations. The opportunity finally comes when Grete
concludes, based on the tracks that Gregor has left from his
habit of crawling around the walls and the ceiling, that he
would be better off without all the furniture in his room.
Not daring to ask her father for any assistance, Grete solicits
her mother to help move the large, heavy objects out of
Gregor’s room. Grete makes sure that Gregor is well
covered––hidden as completely as possible beneath the couch
and the sheet––then signals for her mother to enter the room.
The two women do their best to move the heavy chest, but
after a quarter of an hour, they are unable to move it any
significant distance. This leads to a conversation—in
whispers––about whether the idea to move Gregor’s furniture
might indicate that they had given up on the possibility that he

43
could return to his normal state. His mother believes that they
should not move the furniture at all, but in Grete’s new-found
confidence, she is able to persuade her mother that moving the
chest is the right thing to do, reinstating the effort to push it
out of the room. This is one of the first obvious hints at the
transformation that Grete is experiencing. Scholars who have
viewed “The Metamorphosis” through a feminist lens, have
focused considerable attention on Grete’s transformation from
dependant child, to independent, more self-assured adult.
Gregor initially supports Grete’s idea that his room should
be cleared of obstacles, but he soon becomes nostalgic over the
desk and pictures and other items of memorabilia that had
shaped his life up to the time of his metamorphosis. Unable to
contain himself any longer, he runs out from under the couch
in hopes of stopping his mother and sister from taking away
any more of his furniture. When they return to the room,
Gregor is clamped onto a picture on his wall, causing Grete to
shield her mother from witnessing the horror that has become
her son. But before her mother can be led out of the room, she
sees Gregor and faints. Grete searches the apartment for
smelling solutions to arouse her mother, and Gregor, in a
frantic effort to assist, follows his sister out of the room,
indirectly causing her to break a bottle, a shard of which cuts
Gregor’s face. Grete then shuts Gregor out of his room and
proceeds to tend to her mother. In an effort to deal with his
helplessness and worry, Gregor climbs around the walls and
ceiling, eventually falling onto the living room table.
Before long, the door bell rings and Grete lets her father in,
telling him that her mother had fainted and that Gregor has
gotten loose. Gregor’s father grows incensed by what he
assumes is Gregor’s wrong doing. At this point, the reader
becomes aware of how much Gregor’s father has changed since
Gregor’s metamorphosis. He has turned from a lethargic, failed
businessman to a productive, active member of the work force.
When Gregor sees him, he is stunned by how fit he looks, his
appearance enhanced by his blue uniform with gold buttons.
When his father finally sees him, a very slow chase around the
living room ensues. Just as Gregor gets some distance, his

44
father starts pelting him with apples. Part II ends as Gregor’s
mother runs out of Gregor’s room, begging her husband to
spare their son, just as Gregor loses consciousness.

Part III opens with a discussion of the serious injury inflicted

on Gregor, disabling him for over a month, and leaving him
with a rotten apple stuck to his body, no one willing to take it
off. Despite his impaired movement, Gregor is convinced that
his injury has at least reminded his family that he is not their
enemy; they have even begun to leave the living room door
open at night, allowing him to watch them from the darkness
of his room. It is at this point when the reader is made aware of
the employment that each member of the family has
found––concrete signs of their respective transformations from
inert dependency to active independence: Gregor’s mother has
found work as a seamstress for an undergarment company, his
sister is working as a salesgirl while also “learning shorthand
and French in the evenings on the chance of bettering herself”
(123), and his father, who often falls asleep in his uniform, has
become a bank messenger. In addition to their new jobs, the
Samsa family has released their servant and hired “a gigantic
bony charwoman with white hair flying around her
head…[to]…do the rough work” (124). With the family so
busy, Gregor sees himself as an increasing burden, lamenting
the fact that his family members are forced to work so hard,
and that they can not move to a more suitable home because of
him.
Gregor becomes increasingly glum, at times wallowing in
memories of his past as a commercial traveler, and other times
stewing at how his family––particularly his sister––have begun
to neglect him. He sees no reason for his neglect, given that
the charwoman whom the family has hired shows no fear of
him, and regularly opens his door and says a few words to “the
old dung beetle” (127). As time goes by, Gregor grows
increasingly depressed—a state that Kafka himself often
struggled with. In the story, Gregor rarely eats and is forced to
deal with the growing grime in his room, as well as the stray
objects that the family have stored there to make room for

45
three lodgers, described as “serious gentlemen…with full
beards” (127), whom Gregor starts to resent––“ ‘ How these
lodgers are stuffing themselves, and here am I dying of
starvation!’” (127).
On a night when the lodgers are gorging on steak, Gregor
hears––for the first time since his metamorphosis––the sound
of his sister’s violin coming from the kitchen. Having finished
their meals, the lodgers ask if the violin can be played in the
living room instead of the kitchen. Gregor’s father agrees for
his daughter, and the family carry the music stand, the music
and Grete’s violin into the living room where Grete sets up and
begins to play. Excited by the sound of his sister’s violin,
Gregor crawls into the living room to listen. He is aware of
how ghastly he must appear––so much dust and old food stuck
to his body––but he doesn’t care.
In the beginning of the performance, everyone is fully
absorbed in the music. But after a while, the lodgers grow
restless and move toward the back of the room, puffing on
their cigars. Meanwhile Gregor, who is thoroughly moved by
the music, inches forward, hoping to catch his sister’s eye. As
he crawls farther into the living room, he imagines his sister
playing privately for him in his room; he imagines confessing
how he had always intended to send her to the conservatorium,
and imagines his sister’s elated response, bursting into tears and
kissing him on the neck. At the height of Gregor’s fantasy, one
of the lodgers sees him and points him out to Gregor’s father
who does his best to divert their attention from the giant dung
beetle. In the commotion, Grete stops playing her violin and
rushes into the lodgers’ room to make their beds before her
father can usher them back. Finally the lead lodger stamps his
foot and announces that he plans to give notice, and that due to
the unsanitary conditions, he will not pay for the time he has
already spent there.
Gregor stays still as his father slumps in his chair and his
mother loses hold of Grete’s violin, letting it drop to the
ground. Finally Grete speaks, declaring that the situation
cannot go on any longer. She makes a distinction between
Gregor and the creature they have been taking care of,

46
demanding that they find a way to get rid of him. Gregor’s
father tries to think of some sort of agreement they might be
able to work out with Gregor, but Grete is insistent that her
father “must try to get rid of the idea that this is Gregor” (134).
She rushes behind her father and in a frightful fury insists that
the creature wants to take over their home. Gregor does his
best to turn around and crawl back to his room, but in his
weakened state, the process is difficult and slow. When he
finally makes it back, his sister rushes to the door and locks him
inside. Gregor lets his body relax and wishes that he had the
power to disappear, as his sister now seems to want. But
Gregor holds no ill will, and in a state of relative calm, he
reflects on his family until the bell on the clock tower strikes
three and he takes his final breath, sinking to the floor and
dying at that exact moment.
The following morning, the charwoman arrives and goes
about her noisy routine, eventually peeking into Gregor’s room
and trying to tickle him with the end of the broom handle.
When this garners no reaction, she begins to prod him until it
becomes clear that he is dead. She immediately walks to the
Samsas’ room, opens the door and announces Gregor’s death.
Grete and her parents all gather at Gregor’s door to confirm
that he has indeed died. Then the charwoman opens the
window and shuts the door.
Before long, the three lodgers come out of their room and
demand breakfast. The charwoman quiets them and points
them into Gregor’s room where they can see the dung beetle’s
corpse. Soon after, Grete and her parents emerge from the
bedroom and Grete’s father demands that the lodgers leave
immediately, demonstrating an authority that he hasn’t
possessed since the collapse of his business. After a moment of
protest, the lodgers leave and the family feels “as if a burden
has been lifted” (138). Grete and her parents decide to take the
day off from work and go outside for a stroll. As they’re writing
their respective letters of excuse, the charwoman announces
that she has disposed of Gregor’s body.
The story ends as the remaining Samsas leave the apartment
together and take the train out to the countryside. They realize

47
that their situation is more hopeful than it had once seemed.
They will finally have the opportunity to move to a smaller and
more manageable apartment. As they reflect on their
improving state, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa become simultaneously
“aware of their daughter’s increasing vivacity, [and] that in spite
of all the sorrow of recent times…she had bloomed into a
pretty girl with a good figure” (139). They realize that the time
to find her a husband is coming soon. “And it was like a
confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intensions that
at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet
first and stretched her young body” (139).

Note
1. All primary source references and citations from the following:
Kafka, Franz. “The Metamorphosis,” translated by Willa and Edwin
Muir. In Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken
Books, Inc., 1971: pgs. 89-139.

48
 Critical Views

MARK M. ANDERSON ON THE BUG AS METAPHOR

This critical tendency to de-emphasize the bug’s status as a
visual object of representation reached its most extreme and
brilliant limit in Stanley Corngold’s influential essay “The
Metamorphosis of the Metaphor”. 4 Drawing on Anders’s
insight that Kafka often literalizes metaphors as the basis for
his central images and plot lines, Corngold interprets Gregor’s
form as primarily linguistic and rhetorical rather than visual.
Because the text circumvents the dialectical relationship of
metaphor, insisting that Gregor is a bug but without denying
him specifically human traits, the monstrous vermin form
functions as a ‘mutilated metaphor, uprooted from familiar
language’(59), an ‘opaque sign’ (56). Anything disturbing about
his appearance arises primarily from a disturbing use of
rhetorical structure, an ‘unclean’ mixing of the metaphor’s
human tenor and its material vehicle.

It appears, then, that the metamorphosis in the Samsa

household of man into vermin is unsettling not only
because vermin are disturbing, or because the vivid
representation of a human ‘louse’ is disturbing, but
because the indeterminate, fluid crossing of a human
tenor and a material vehicle is in itself unsettling. (56)

Such interpretations have an indisputable hold on Kafka’s

story and, I suspect, are ultimately correct. Kafka knew that his
story was kind of literary tease, that it depended on the reader’s
imagination to visualize what is only suggested by the text.
When confronted with his editor’s plan to illustrate the bug for
the cover of the first edition, his response was unambiguous:
‘The insect itself cannot be depicted’ (letter of 25 October
1915). He proposed instead the image of a half-opened door
with only darkness behind it—the bug itself remains unseen
and the reader must perform the same act of imagination that is

49
required by text in the passage from linguistic sign to mental
image. Kafka’s suggestion was in fact taken up, and a black-and-
white illustration by Ottomar Starke adorned the story’s first
edition in Kurt Wolff ’s series Die weißen Blätter.
None the less, one cannot help feeling that such critical and
authorial strictures have something of a magician’s
legerdemain—Now you see him, now you don’t—and hide as
much as they reveal. Although the text is a verbal artifact which
expertly subverts the metaphorical function of language, it also
requires the reader to make a sustained effort to visualize the
bug within a minutely described environment. Moreover, such
strictures obscure the fact that the text repeatedly displays
Gregor’s body as a visual object of unusual power—a
scandalous, grotesque object difficult to behold, yes, but one
that is attributed with an undeniable aesthetic function, as in
the scene when Gregor hangs himself on the wall in front of
his mother and sister. Indeed, the basic movement of all three
sections of the novella consists in covering and uncovering
Gregor’s body, like a monster at a fair or a sacred icon.

Note
4. First Published in 1970, the essay was reprinted in an expanded
version in The Necessity of Form, which is the edition quoted here.

STANLEY CORNGOLD ON THE DISTORTION OF

METAPHOR
Kafka’s metamorphosis—through aberrant literalization—of
the metaphor “this man is a vermin” appears to be an intricate
and comprehensive act in which one can discern three orders of
significance, all of which inform The Metamorphosis. These
meanings emerge separately as one focuses critically on three
facts: that the metaphor distorted is a familiar element of
ordinary language; that, the distortion being incomplete, the
body of the original metaphor maintains a shadow existence
within the metamorphosis, and the body of this metaphor—a
verminous bug—is negative and repulsive; and finally, that the

50
source of the metamorphosis is, properly speaking, not the
familiar metaphor but a radical aesthetic intention. Together
these meanings interpenetrate in a dialectical way. For example,
the aesthetic intention reflects itself in a monster but does so by
distorting an initially monstrous metaphor; the outcome of its
destroying a negative is itself a negative. These relations
illuminate both Kafka’s saying, “Doing the negative thing is
imposed on us, an addition” (DF 36–37), and his remark to
Milena Jesenská-Pollak, “But even the truth of longing is not
so much its truth, rather is it an expression of the lie of
everything else” (LM 200). For the sake of analysis, each of the
three intents can be separated and discussed independently.
Kafka metamorphoses a figure of speech embedded in
ordinary language. The intent is to make strange the familiar,
not to invent the new; Kafka’s diaries for the period around
1912 show that his created metaphors are more complex than
“salesmen are vermin.” To stress the estrangement of the
monster from his familiar setting in the metaphor—the dirty
bug—is to stress Gregor Samsa’s estrangement from his
identity in the family. Gregor harks back to, yet defiantly
resists, integration into the “ordinary language” of the family.
The condition of the distorted metaphor, estranged from
familiar speech, shapes the family drama of The Metamorphosis;
the Ungeziefer is in the fullest sense of the word ungeheuer
(monstrous)—a being that cannot be accommodated in a
family.18
Is it too odd an idea to see this family drama as the conflict
between ordinary language and a being having the character of
an indecipherable word? It will seem less odd, at any rate, to
grasp the family life of the Samsas as a characteristic language.
The family defines itself by the ease with which it enters into
collusion on the question of Gregor. Divisions of opinion do
arise—touching, say, on the severity of the treatment due
Gregor—but issue at once into new decisions. The family’s
projects develop within the universe of their concerns, through
transparent words and gestures that communicate without
effort. At the end, images of family unity survive the story: the
mother and father in complete union; mother, father, and

51
daughter emerging arm in arm from the parents’ bedroom to
confront the boarders; mother and father “growing quieter and
communicating almost unconsciously through glances” at the
sight of their good-looking, shapely daughter (M 58).

Note
18. Weinberg, Kafkas Dichtungen, p. 317.

GEORGE GIBIAN COMPARES THE METAMORPHOSIS

WITH THE JUDGMENT

The elements of phantasy, nightmare and fear are much

stronger in The Metamorphosis than in The Judgment. The
horror of waking up transformed into an insect brings in its
train all our subconscious fears of transformation (discussed
among others in Freud’s essay on The Uncanny). In The
Judgment, we are at least temporarily in a normal world, and
nothing ever happens which is completely impossible; in The
Metamorphosis we are never placed in an everyday world. The
narrative has the tone of carefully evaluating all evidence, but
the family’s reaction to Gregor’s transformation—their effort to
behave in the most rational and acceptable way—only strikes us
as a frightening incongruity. It suggests to us that our own
accepted world may be as unreal as that of the Samsas, and that
painstaking reasonableness and conventionality may be as
misplaced and vain as Gregor’s and his family’s. The failure of
the characters to question the possibility of Gregor’s
metamorphosis, which is the most surprising thing of all and
the basis of the action, makes the readers insecure in regard to
things we consider so certain that we seldom even feel the need
to think about them.
More clearly than The Judgment, The Metamorphosis moves
from a beginning which ought to be a renewal of life (the
awakening in the morning), but actually is moribund and
catastrophic, to a conclusion which brings the death of the
protagonist, accompanied by the promise of an improved life
for the survivors. When we look at the line of development
52
from Gregor’s point of view, it is a steady decline leading to
Gregor’s extinction. When we look at it through the family’s
eyes, it is a long effort to contain and to eliminate Gregor and
the evils he has brought about—the lodgers, the cleaning
woman’s attitude—a struggle which is crowned with success in
the end when he dies and his body is disposed of. The Judgment
had a similarly tight structure, with a sharply marked
beginning, middle and end, but the death of the son lacked the
counterpoise which it has in The Metamorphosis, the
brightening future of the rest of the family, which shows still
more clearly the son’s guilt and worthlessness.6
The still broader parabolic meaning of The Metamorphosis is
its greatest point of difference from The Judgment. If the Letter
applies only to Kafka and his father, and The Judgment to the
father-son relationship in general with overtones implicating
other power-to-subject relations, then The Metamorphosis has
strong suggestions of many possible interpretations. Some of
the situations to which it can be taken to refer are: man and the
state; man and his subconscious feelings of guilt and
inadequacy in general; totemistic fears of metamorphosis; the
Jew in a Gentile society; man and grace; or man and God. The
mood of the story is precise, but the references made by it
parabolically are multiple.

Note
6. It should be pointed out that in contradistinction to the two
stories discussed here, most of Kafka’s writing, his novels as well as
stories, is characterized by the absence of a clearly marked conclusion.
This, however, does not mean that such works are inconclusive. Their
construction, unlike that of The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, is
multicellular, and each cell bears its own conclusion within itself. The
series as a whole therefore needs none, since each unit composing it
conveys the message of the unending series. This is the point missed
by those who criticize Kafka for the frequency with which he left his
works unfinished. Günther Anders, Kafka: Pro und Kantra (Munich,
1951), pp. 34-36, has an interesting discussion of the cyclical and
repetitive nature of Kafka’s scenes, but errs in condemning Kafka’s
philosophy, besides other reasons, on the ground of his failure to
complete his works. Wilhelm Emrich, “Franz Kafka,” in Hermann
Friedmann and Otto Mann, Deutsche Literatur im Zwaneigsten

53
Jahrhundert (Heidelberg, 1954), p. 231 and passim, discusses
interestingly the infinitely continuable series of Kafka’s episodes, and
Paul Goodman, The Structure of Literature (Chicago, 1954), pp. 173-
183, analyzes the cellular structure of The Castle.

M. ELIZABETH MACANDREW ON THE FATHER/SON

REVERSAL
Literalized metaphor permits Kafka the same sort of Flexibility
that it gave to Swift. Gregor’s father and sister are also
transformed in the course of the story, but, as we shall see, in
them the change is less permanent than in Gregor.
Consequently, Kafka treats it figuratively, not literally. As
Gregor’s humiliation deepens and his father’s self-confidence
and self-respect grow, we begin to understand what really
makes Gregor an insect. He has gained a moral ascendancy
over his father, who, his business having failed, sits around the
house or dodders helplessly about, supported by cane. Gregor
has become the pillar of the household, paying the debts and
planning to send his sister to the conservatory. But he is a mere
insect of a man, quite incapable of dominating anyone for long.
The roles of father and son reverse themselves, the son
becoming an insignificant insect hiding in corners, the father,
self-confident in his bank messenger’s uniform, driving him
away.
We can assume from the exactness of the reversal that father
and son are much alike—weak men, both, who feel the need of
a front with which to face the world. For each, a precariously
held status is symbolized in a uniform. When Gregor emerges
from his room that first morning, his eyes fall at once on “a
photograph of himself on military service…a carefree smile on
his face, inviting one to respect his uniform and military bearing”
(p. 82, my italics). Similarly, the father, once he has succeeded
in dominating his son again, wears his uniform even in the
house. “He slept [we are told] fully dressed where he sat, as if
he were ready for service at any moment and even here only at
the beck and call of his superior” (p.111). He is now at the

54
point at which Gregor was as a salesman, as we saw when he
pleaded with the chief clerk, “I’m loyally bound to serve the
chief, you know that very well” (p.82).
As the struggle between the two unfolds, we begin to find
there is a contrast between the patient, self-sacrificing son who
has rescued his helpless father from disaster (this is Gregor’s
version) and that same son timidly fleeing, without thought of
resistance, without even anger, before the wrath of his
aggressive father, who turns out to be quite capable of taking
over again his position as head of the family (this is the action).
And because of this contradiction we suspect Gregor’s motives
in making his self-sacrifice.
The scene in which Gregor’s father wounds him is very
detailed and reveals the psychological situation. Gregor looks
at his father and “truly, this was not the father he had imagined
to himself…The man who used to lie wearily sunk in
bed…who could not really rise to his feet…Now he was
standing there in fine shape; dressed in a smart blue uniform
with gold buttons” (p. 107f). Gregor flees and the father chases
him, then bombards him with apples. One “landed right on his
back and sank in; Gregor wanted to drag himself forward, as if
this startling, incredible pain could be left behind him…With
his last conscious look he saw…his mother…in her
underbodice…rushing towards his father, leaving one after
another behind her on the floor her loosened petticoats,
stumbling over her petticoats straight to his father and
embracing him in complete union with him—but here Gregor’s
sight began to fail—with her hands clasped round his father’s
neck as she begged for her son’s life” (p. 109f).
Having been brought to this scene armed largely with
Gregor’s view of the situation, we can hardly fail to share his
bewilderment at this sudden revelation of the father’s violence,
but we, being readers, begin to make adjustments which
Gregor cannot make, to understand what this bewilderment
reveals about him as well as what it tells us about his father.
When Gregor faints, shutting out the complete union of his
parents, our sympathies are still with him. But our
understanding has gone far beyond his. It is conflict with his

55
father that makes Gregor a beetle, not being a salesman; that
only made him conscious of it. The wounding re-reverses the
roles exactly; “his injury had impaired, probably for ever, his
powers of movement, and for the time being it took him long,
long minutes to creep across his room like an old invalid” (p. 110,
my italics). Gregor is now in the state his father was in at the
beginning of the story.

PHILIP H. RHEIN COMPARES KAFKA WITH ARTIST

ALFRED KUBIN
Everyone is familiar enough with the uniqueness of the Kafka
and Kubin world, a world from which the reader or viewer is
often alienated by fantastic objects and events. Logic as we
ordinarily speak of it has no meaning in this world that lies
beyond the limits of man’s workaday experience, if not beyond
man’s understanding. It is not a fairy-tale world of dreams, but
a world of dreams in which enough reality is retained that the
reader or viewer is forced to acknowledge its familiarity.
Gregor in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) or Death in
Kubin’s The Painter (1918) are obviously unreal figures in the
ordinary world; yet both are treated in terms of the clearest,
most concise logic. They are. The logical treatment of the
unreal, so obvious in these instances, is true for all of Kafka’s
writings and Kubin’s drawings. Once the original situation is
accepted, the dénouement follows in the most logical manner.
The world as revealed by Kafka and Kubin is a product of
their personal, inner experience; and because of their persistent
preoccupation with the details and clutter of the real world, we
are forced to be concerned with the living, the human, and the
real in an apparently unreal situation. This emphasis upon
detail is most significant when we are aware of the economy of
expression employed by both artists. Nowhere are we bogged
down under a torrent of needless verbal or visual description.
The minutiae of the real world are retained as a point of
contact between our reality and the suprareality of the art
products and as an environmental backdrop to unreal or
56
strange characters who are misfits in an otherwise fluid
situation. The reader or viewer is constantly tossed between
the extremes of reality and unreality which are on the point of
meeting but never meet.
On one level, Kafka’s and Kubin’s works express keen
psychological observation and social criticism; but beneath this
surface level, they seek to shape a metaphysical experience
through which a man may find his freedom from time and
actuality. They do not pretend that modern life is beautiful and
humane; their intent is quite different. They do not seek to
resolve man’s social problems but rather to release man from
them so that he can attain a level of understanding that
transcends the imposed limits of time and space.
This world that they create is an abstract world; not abstract
in the way that science is abstract, but abstract in that it deals
only with the essential. Here the personal problem no longer
exists, and that which seems still personal, is the very moment
it is uttered, dissolved into the realm of myth. Kafka and Kubin
succeed in projecting the personal problems of the individual
into the realm of the universal problems of men. In a work by
either of the men, the initially private problem of the piece is
extended and modified until it no longer exists on the purely
personal level. By means of the artist’s selection and
manipulation of material, the personal evolves into the
suprapersonal, and the problems of the individual are
superseded by the problems of man. Camus, in writing about
Kafka, stated that, “His work is universal to the extent to which
it represents the emotionally moving face of man fleeing
humanity, deriving from his contradictions reasons for
believing, reasons for hoping from his fecund despair and
calling life his terrifying apprenticeship in death.”3 Camus’
statement is equally applicable to the art of Kubin.
As we move from the ideological world that frames the
works of Kafka and Kubin into the particular world that is
locked within that frame, we enter a world of language and line
that is systematically ordered and controlled with absolute
precision. In The Metamorphosis by Kafka and The Painter by
Kubin, the ideological similarities of the two artists are

57
underscored by the election and arrangement of details that
serve to guide the reader or viewer of these works. To begin at
the beginning, the titles themselves invite speculation. Just as
the transformation of the commercial traveler Gregor Samsa is
completed in the first sentence of the Kafka story, so too is the
death of the painter an obvious and immediately conveyed
visual fact of Kubin’s pencil drawing. Gregor’s metamorphosis
and the painter’s death are the unquestionable givens of the two
art products, and these facts are never doubted by the reader or
viewer. Unlike the pattern of traditional analytic tragedy in
which the questions of guilt and innocence are raised and
resolved, these questions are never addressed by either Kafka
or Kubin. Paradoxically, however, these same questions become
the central concern of the reader or viewer as he seeks to
untangle the meaning of the presented details. The initial
problem is further complicated by an additional given fact. The
ambiguity of the titles emphasizes the impossibility of any
facile interpretation of either the story or the drawing.
Obviously, the metamorphosis of Gregor and the death of the
painter are accomplished acts; however, the title of the Kafka
story might apply to Gregor’s sister, Grete, with more
justification than to Gregor himself, for it is, after all, her
metamorphosis that is revealed in the unfolding of the
narrative. The title of the Kubin drawing is equally ambiguous.
On first glance, the painter of the title seemingly refers to the
lifeless human form that lies before the canvas; yet the linear
arrangement of details within the drawing quickly moves the
viewer’s eyes to the central figure of death, here portrayed with
an artist’s palette in his hand, completing the as yet unfinished
canvas. Death is the focal point of the drawing; and he, like
Grete in The Metamorphosis, is the figure we witness acting out
the drama of the composition.
The movement inherent within the two art works is also
comparable. The Kafka or Kubin character is brought into the
conflict between the world of everyday life and the world of
supernatural anxiety. As he moves more deeply into this
conflict, no problem is resolved; everything begins over and
over again. He attempts to capture meaning through what

58
negates that meanings, but he is constantly thrown back upon
himself, upon the one thing that has no definition. He is caught
in the circular movement of a whirlpool that inevitably sucks
him under. This circular movement is emphasized in The
Metamorphosis by Gregor’s perpetual motion that never budges
him from the spot. The circle that forms the frame of the story
by enclosing the action between two metamorphoses is
repeated internally in several ways. In the first part of The
Metamorphosis, the constant ticking of the alarm clock
symbolically reflects the irrevocable circle of Gregor’s past life
as a traveling salesman, locked into the world of clock time.
Later in the story, when specific time no longer has any
meaning in Gregor’s world, the alarm clock disappears and is
replaced by Gregor’s own ceaseless, atemporal, circular
movement that binds him within a world that is no longer
understood or measured realistically. Finally, Gregor’s aimless
circular wanderings are halted by the round apples that are
embedded in his hard shell. Through Gregor’s death, temporal
order is restored, the shapeless vagueness that permeates the
story is eradicated and the circle of the metamorphosis is
completed.

Notes
3. David Eggenschwiler. “The Metamorphosis, Freud, and the
Chains of Odysseus,” in Franz Kafka, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1986), 199–219.

MICHAEL ROWE ON THEMES IN

THE METAMORPHOSIS
The critical literature on Metamorphosis is voluminous and wide
ranging. Themes in the story include, among myriad others,
incest, rebellion against the father, and family shame; 7
socioeconomic and social class critiques; 8 and isolation and
alienation, 9 More relevant for this essay are discussions by such
writers as R. D. Luke, Paul Landsberg, and Robert Coles about
the story’s symbolism, in which physical transformation may

59
metaphorically represent psychological or spiritual
transformation.10 Illness threatens not only the individual’s
physical integrity but also the individual’s identity and sense of
self in the world, as Eric Cassell writes: “Persons do things.
They act, create, make, take apart, put together, wind, unwind
…When illness makes it impossible for people to do these
things, they are not themselves.” 11 Not only are those who fall
ill “not themselves” from their own point of view; they are not
themselves to others, or, at the very least, others have trouble
seeing the “self” they have known in the past in the ill person
they see before them in the present.
Although becoming an insect is not quite a disease, Gregor’s
transformed identity, in which his taken-for-granted life is
suddenly disrupted,12 may be likened to the onset of serious
physical or mental illness. Serious illness damages the person
not only in fact but also in self-perception when others confirm
this damage without giving comfort or demonstrating their
acceptance of the changed person (or even, perhaps, when they
do). As a result of both self-perception and perception of
others, the person experiences the “spoiled identity” of the
stigmatized, 13 in the words of Erving Goffman, and becomes
an “other.”
Also relevant for this essay are those commentaries on the
actions of Gregor’s family members. As Coles writes,
“Metamorphosis asks us to consider not only Gregor’s deadly
transformation but our own continuing experience as survivors:
Do we profit handily from the human degradation of others? Is
our comfort earned at the expense of terrible suffering? If so,
what happens to us, what metamorphosis falls upon us?”14 Luke
suggests that the story “casts dreadful and tragic light on
human incapacity to appreciate disaster.”15
Four themes in Metamorphosis are particularly relevant to
my concerns. The first is a dual sundering of Gregor’s
humanity and of his function within his family and society due
to this inability to maintain his employment. Gregor’s
humanity, to the extent that his parents and sister acknowledge
it, is inextricably tied to his function as economic provider.
When his metamorphosis makes it impossible for him to

60
perform his job, his humanity, in the eyes of those closest to
him, is threatened as well.
The second is the power and ambiguity of the function of
caregiver, a theme that is likely to give pause to readers who
have stood on either side of the patient-caregiver relationship.
Grete, closest to Gregor in the family, naturally assumes the
position of his caretaker, but she is also the first to rebel against
the burden that Gregor’s transformation has imposed on the
family and to put up a barrier between him and any mercy he
might hope to receive from his parents. For his part, Gregor is,
at first, grateful to his sister for her ministrations; then he
resents his dependence on her and later resents her neglect of
him. In addition, Gregor has fantasies of stealing her away
from the others and becoming her sold protector. This fantasy,
whatever sexual connotations it has, also involves reversing the
power relationship between them.
The third thematic concern is the temporal nature of the
changes precipitated by Gregor’s illness. While Kafka’s
portrayal of family relationship in the novella is almost
uniformly grim, there is a gradual movement away, and finally
an exclusion of Gregor, from the family circle. This inexorable
movement is prompted in part by economic concerns, since
Gregor’s family members have to turn much of their attention
to bringing in income to replace his, but it is largely an
emotional movement away from him and growing denial of his
humanity.
The fourth thematic interest is Gregor’s continued efforts
toward autonomy. Gregor’s attempts to escape his dependent
role—first when he tries to protect his furniture from his
sister’s zeal and later when he leaves his room—precipitate his
injury and, finally, death. Even the most loving of caregivers
might wince at this description, recognizing the difficulty of
alternating between roles of “total caretaker” and equal partner.

Notes
7. See F.D. Luke, “The Metamorphosis,” in Franz Kafka Today, ed.
Angel Flores and Homer Swander (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1958), 25–44; Richard H. Lawson, Franz Kafka (New York:
Unger , 1987); Paul L. Landsberg, “The Metamorphosis” in The Kafka

61
Problem, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Octogon, 1963),
129–140;Kohnke; and Eggenschwiler.
8. Ritchie Robertson, “On The Metamorphosis and the America
Novel,” in Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle
(London Longman, 1995), 157–163; Coles; and Landsberg.
9. Vladimir Nabokov, “Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis,” in
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 251–283; Martin Greenberg,
The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature (New York: Basic,
1968); Hartmut Bohme, “Mother Milena; On Kafka’s Narcissism,” in
The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives for Our Time, ed. Angel Flores
(New York: Gordian Press, 1977), 80–90, Kohnke; Lawson; and
Landsberg.
10. See Luke Landsberg; Coles. See also Jack Coutchan, “Franz
Kafka: The Metamorphosis,” Medical Humanitites Literature, Arts and
Medicine website. http//endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit.med-db/webdocs/
webdescrips/kafka98-des.html (New York University, 1997)
11. Eric J. Cassell, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 41.
12. Bohme; Landsberg.
13. Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled
Identity (New York: J. Aronson, 1974).
14. Coles, 311-312.
15. Luke, 33.

MICHAEL P. RYAN ON THE NAME SAMSA

In Kafka scholarship there is often a tendency toward Judaic
and/or Christian interpretation. Adding Samsara (Hinduism,
Buddhism) to Weinberg’s Judaic and Christian mix, might
suggest the metamorphosis of world religions. It could be
viewed as an ecumenical movement; each religion working in
tandem, making its contribution to “Die Verwandlung,” Kafka’s
interest in and struggle with “religion” could also emphasize
each faith’s antagonism toward the other. Gregor’s last name,
though, passed on from generation to generation, suggests the
longevity and prevalence of Samsara. If there is to be an
overview of the possible world religions in “Die Verwandlung,”
it might hinge on Samsara’s emphasis on suffering via
transmigration.

62
 Having said that, the question remains: does Kafka actually
feel “alone” or does he feel trapped within a horrible cycle?
Kafka tells us “my writings were about you” (Father 25); thus
he may not be alone. Quite the contrary, he may be constantly
followed, haunted by the oppressive image of his father.
Considering Kafka’s entire body of works, we are presented
with an author who takes the role of something one might term
transcendent. “Die Verwandlung” serves beautifully as an
example; as in so many of his other stories, the main character
appears to be Franz Kafka; that is why we have “K” in Der
Prozeß, Bende-mann in “Das Urteil,” and in this case Samsa.
Kafka himself considers the similarity between Georg
Bendemann’s name and his own. He writes, “Georg has the
same number of letters as Franz. In Bendemann, ‘mann’ is a
strengthening of ‘Bende’…But Bende has exactly the same
number of letters as Kafka, and the vowel e occurs in the same
places as does the vowel a in Kafka” (Diaries 214). In his works
he transcends his existence as merely the author; it is a
transmigration of his “soul” into new lives and bodies. He thus
watches himself in this new life, his father once again stalking
him within, causing suffering and a consequent death, whether
by suicide or slow starvation. And as he dies within each story,
Kafka views himself reborn in another, whether as a man
recalling his “apehood” (Kafka, Report 281), a dog in
“Forschungen eines Hundes” (Investigations of a Dog”), or
vermin in “Die Verwandlung,” The same torturous cycle then
begins once again. This is why Samsara, denoting rebirth and
suffering, is so fitting; with this term Kafka tells us what
Gregor Samsa is atoning for, as “Das Urteil” came out of Kafka
like a real birth, covered with filth and slime,” and as the brown
liquid drips from Gregor Samsa, we know this vermin might be
the rebirth of that first slimy conception (Diaries 214). It may
be Georg Bendemann, also known as Gregor Samsa, atoning
for his suicide.
According to Holland, Gregor (“Samson”) saves the Samsa
family “(“the chosen people”) from the three boarders (“the
Philistines”) (148–49). Apart from the story of Samson in
Judges, Holland states, “in fact, a good deal of incidental

63
imagery of ‘Metamorphosis’ was derived from Isaiah” (14).
Reading “Die Verwandlung,” however, one does not find much
similarity between Gregor and Samson. Samson possesses great
strength; Gregor does not have the strength to get out of bed,
he must swing “himself out of bed with all his might” (Kafka,
“Metamorphosis” 125). Moreover, even if Gregor did possess
extraordinary strength, unlike Samson there is no long hair to
be cut. Similarly, Gregor does not appear to be, like Samson, a
judge of Israel. Nor does the family’s treatment of Gregor
correspond to Samson’s familial relationship. Gregor is left in
his room with rotten food, and repeatedly driven back into his
den of misery by his father. Samson’s family is at his disposal;
when he wants to marry a particular woman his family is happy
to support him. Holland, however, does not suggest that “Die
Verwandlung” is an inversion of the story of Samson; rather, he
draws on an analogy. He writes, “Samson’s sacrifice is a
traditional analogue to Christ’s; in German he is called
Judenchrist” (149). Weinberg and Holland agree that “Kafka
has given Gregor a number of Christ-like attributes” (Holland
147). Weinberg refers to Gregor as “Christkind,” and surmises
that Gregor’s metamorphosis is related to his desire to send his
sister to conservatoire (237). There does appear to be something
ontological about Gregor. Furthermore, Samsara’s emphasis on
suffering and rebirth could allow for such an interpretation; but
there are other possibilities. Gregor’s savior quality might be
explained by eastern philosophy’s notion of the avatar. This
will be discussed in further detail later.
Note
This article owes a deep debt of gratitude to David H.
Chisholm, Professor of German Studies, University of Arizona,
for his invaluable insight, editing, and scholarly criticism. I also
thank Elisabeth Neiss Cobbs, University of Arizona, for her
patient editing, and The German Quarterly’s reviewers for their
thought-provoking suggestions.

Works Cited
Holland, Norman. “Realism and Unrealism: Kafka’s
‘Metamorphosis’” Modern Fiction Studies 6 (1958): 143–50.

64
Kafka, Franz. Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings. Ed. and
Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. New York: Shocken,
1954.
———. Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910–1923. Ed. Max Brod. Trans.
Joseph Kresh (1910–13) and Martin Greenberg with the
cooperation of Hannah Arendt (1914–23). New York: Shocken,
1976.
———. “The Metamorphosis.” The Great Short Works of Franz Kafka:
The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories. Trans.
Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
117–88. References follow this text.
———. “Report for an Academy.” The Great Short Works of Franz
Kafka: The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories.
Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1995. 281–93. References follow this text.
Weinberg, Kurt. Kafkas Dichtungen: Die Travestein des Mythos. Berne:
Francke, 1963.

MARK SPILKA ON KAFKA’S PREDECESSORS

Kafka’s genius must then be gauged, like that of other authors,
in terms of influence and tradition. The question is: In terms of
what tradition? Philip Rahv defines it, ideologically, as a
tendency “against scientific rationalism, against civilization,
against the heresies of the man of the city whose penalty is
spiritual death”; in Kafka, the tendency is balanced by an even
greater stress on the humanity of the dying hero, regardless of
his heresies. This leaves him still a formal innovator, in Rahv’s
words, an idiosyncratic writer who “departed from the norms
of the literary imagination.” 3 Actually there is nothing
idiosyncratic about Kafka’s genius; in form and content, he
belongs to a special order of the urban grotesque, with its roots
in German romanticism of the early nineteenth century and in
Russian and English realism of the middle decades.
Consider the origin of his great short novel, The
Metamorphosis. It was written in the fall of 1912, along with
“The Judgment” and the early chapters of Amerika, in a
veritable burst of “imitative” writing. Its basic method, that of
psychological fantasy, had been anticipated by Hoffmann in the

65
early 1800s; its blend of fantasy with urban realism began with
Gogol and Dostoevsky in succeeding decades; and its central
situation, that of a son locked in his room and abhorred by his
own family, was first devised by Dickens at mid-century. In
effect, these writers formed a literary trend, which Kafka
brought to full fruition or perhaps brought into being with his
story, as he synthesized and clarified the latent form. To trace
the origins of The Metamorphosis is to establish the existence of
this trend, to place Kafka well within it, and to link him
especially with two other masters of the genre, Dickens and
Dostoevsky, who provided the immediate sources for his story.
The trail begins with E.T.A. Hoffman, a German romantic
who was fascinated with doubles. This was a familiar theme in
German literature, one of the first foreshadowings of the
modern concept of the unconscious. To enhance the theme,
Hoffmann added the principle of hostility between doubles, or
the conflict of perverse and evil impulses with the most intense
idealism. His own divided nature provided the insight. As a
legal councilor in Berlin and Warsaw, he knew the drabness,
poverty, and obtuseness of the bureaucratic world. At the same
time he tried to escape that world through lyric and
imaginative flights in art and music. He tried to lead two lives,
and became himself perverse and hostile in the process. But,
instead of presenting that split directly in terms of his own
experience, he projected it into the realm of fairy tale and
fantasy. His doubles lived on a superearthly plane, in country
inns and castles; they remained cut off, as it were, from their
social and psychic origins, except for passing contact with the
urban scene. It took a dose or two of Russian realism to bring
them down to earth again, and back to their proper quarters;
and, aptly enough, it took another frustrated idealist, Nikolai
Gogol, to administer the first dose.
Gogol too was familiar with bureaucracy, having served for a
time as a government clerk in St. Petersburg. But, instead of
suppressing his experience, he used it to depict the insignificant
lives of office drudges. He was the first to give careful and
sympathetic attention to such types, the first to expose the
squalor and banality of their existence. According to one critic,

66
he was a romantic pessimist who fought ugliness in a peculiar
way, by recording it in minute detail.4 On his romantic side, he
was attracted to Hoffman; but as a pessimist he was skeptical of
Hoffman’s buoyant and exotic manner—he liked to parody him
by shifting his magic events to urban settings and exploiting
their comic possibilities. Thus, in “The Nose,” he directly
spoofs the double theme in Hoffman.
In the second chapter of this tale, a lowly clerk awakens,
stretches, and looks in the mirror for a pimple which had
broken out on his nose the night before. To his astonishment
his nose is gone. He pinches himself to make sure he is not
asleep (“But no; he was no longer asleep”), and then leaps from
his bed and begins to search for the missing organ. Later on his
nose turns up as an independent being, a grandly dressed state
councilor, the embodiment of his snobbery and sexual longing.
Gogol archly concludes that “the strangest, most unintelligible
fact of all is that authors actually can select such occurrences
for their subject!” Without thinking much about it, he had
changed the setting to satirize Hoffmann’s favorite subject. But
there was one perceptive reader, Dostoevsky, who took this
transfer seriously. He admired Hoffman as a brilliant
psychologist, but saw also that his doubles belonged in the urban
world which had produced them; that they were more at home,
as it were, in flats and offices than in country inns and castles.
Accordingly, when he wrote his second novel, he restored the
double to his proper dignity, and kept him in his proper
quarters.
This second novel, called The Double, was based conceptually
on “The Nose,” but owed much to other tales by Gogol and
Hoffmann. By a curious fluke of scholarship, two modern
critics have skipped over these connections and compared “The
Nose” with the opening of The Metamorphosis, where a young
commercial traveler, Gregor Samsa wakes up in the shape of a
giant insect.5 But Kafka followed The Double in his story; it was
Dostoevsky who followed Gogol. If we restore the missing link,
we can see how an original image, rather farcical and slight,
gains force and power through brilliant imitation. Consider the
opening of The Double, in the light of Gogol’s comic image; but

67
at the same time, keep Kafka’s insect well in mind. I have
italicized the lines derived from Gogol.

It was a little before eight o’clock in the morning when

Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin, a titular councilor, woke up from
a long sleep. He yawned, stretched, and at last opened his
eyes completely. For two minutes, however, he lay in bed
without moving, as though he were not yet quite certain
whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was
going on around him were real and actual, or the
continuation of his confused dreams. Very soon , however,
Mr. Golyadkin’s senses began….to receive their habitual
and everyday impressions. The dirty green, smoke
begrimed, dusty walls of his little room, with the
mahogany chest drawers and chairs, the table painted
red…and the clothes taken off in haste overnight and
flung in a crumpled heap on the sofa, looked at him
familiarly. At last the damp autumn day, muggy and dirty,
peeped into the room through the dingy window with
such a hostile, sour grimace that Mr. Golyadkin could not
possibly doubt that he was not in the land of Nod, but in
the city of Petersburg, in his own flat on the fourth story
of a huge block of buildings in Shestilavotchny Street.
When he had made this important discovery Mr.
Golyadkin nervously closed his eyes, as though regretting
his dream and wanting to go back to it for a moment. But
a minute later he leapt out of bed at one bound, [and] ran
straight to a little round looking-glass that stood on his chest of
drawers…”What a thing it would be,” said Mr. Golyadkin
in an undertone.”…if I were not up to the mark today, if
something were amiss, if some intrusive pimple had made its
appearance, or anything else unpleasant had happened; so far,
however, there’s nothing wrong, so far everything’s all
right.”

But everything is far from all right, for Golyadkin is a dual

personality—by the end of the day a double appears before
him, a man who looks exactly like him, who even bears his

68
name, and who plainly figures forth his illness. Here, then, is
the intrusive pimple, the unpleasant outgrowth from within,
which first erupts in Gogol’s minor farce, and again in Kafka’s
powerful novella.

Notes
3. Op.Cit., p. 121.
4. Janko Lavrin, ed., Stories from St. Petersburg, by Nikolai Gogol
(London, 1945), p. 8.
5. Victor Erlich, “Gogol and Kafka,” in For Roman Jakobson, ed.
Morris Halle, et al, (The Hague, 1956). pp. 100–108; and T.F. Parry,
“Kafka and Gogol,” German Life and Letters, VI (1953), 141–145.
Both scholars ignore the parody element in “The Nose” and credit
Gogol with profound psychological intentions; but Erlich sees that
the tale is not “an existential disaster.”

PETER STINE ON FAMILIAL RELATIONSHIPS

We might speculate that Kafka, in turning to his family for
subject matter, needed the animal world for fear of violating
his own sense of wholesomeness while exploring under the
rock of repression. His remarks to Brod make it clear that, for
him, to write out of bad or perverted passions (“I have
hundreds of wrong feelings—dreadful ones—the right ones
won’t come—or if they do, only in rages; absolutely weak”)
was to let them get the upper hand. 22 Kafka’s celebrated
writer’s block may have been the exercise of a animal world,
with The Metamorphosis in 1912, did his imagination find its
sanction. Prior to its composition, Kafka confessed to Felice
that “when I didn’t write, I was at once flat on the floor, fit for
the dustbin,”23 We recognize this as the fate that befalls the
hero in this story, which becomes a vehicle for Kafka to review
his own failure, “a general load of fear, weakness, and self-
contempt” before his father, now described from the rock-
bottom reality of a despicable insect, a metamorphosis that
both seals the failure and disassociates him personally from
any charge of disrespect. Upon completing the story, Kafka is
reported to have buoyantly asked of a friend on the streets of

69
Prague, “What do you think of the terrible things that go on
in our family?”24
In The Metamorphosis, then, Kafka grieves about living under
the invisible constraints of a family, and the enabling condition
is Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into a gigantic insect: “It was
no dream.” 25 Gregor’s body is so alien to him that his
transformation has no effect upon his mental life, which
initially sets in motion droll and terrible ironies. Gregor
imagines his family will take his change “calmly, he had no
reason to be upset” (p. 98); he need only “put [his] clothes on”
and race tardily to the office. Once in control of his legs, he
breaks forth into the normal world where his eager
enslavement to routine evokes a wonderful “Ugh!” as the chief
clerk vanishes down the stairs. It is only when his Father drives
this literalization of “troubled dreams” into his room with a
newspaper—“Shoo!”—and locks him there as a prisoner, a
more forcible and telescoped version of his life as son and
servant of officialdom, that Gregor starts to touch reality.
Indeed, his metamorphosis is less a tragedy than a naked
clarification of all Gregor’s relations to the world, a restoration
of Truth—in particular, the hidden rage of the Father who has
been battering on him like an insect.
And yet Gregor is as far removed from this “dazzling”
recognition as the gap between his consciousness and his
numerous waving legs. having toiled for years to bail his parents
out of debt, he now feels “guilt and shame” (p. 112) that they
must work and finds “cheerful” the news that his father has
been duplicitous about finances and has been hoarding his son’s
contributions. There might be hope had Gregor experienced
anger, had he in fact been guilty of the venality the chief clerk
accused him of earlier, but he has no individual thoughts apart
from his filial loyalty. Aware of being increasingly comfortable
with his state of insecthood as he crawls the walls, Gregor need
only hear his Mother talk wistfully of his old desk to renounce
this adjustment. The fear of losing “all recollection of his
human background” (p. 116) will culminate in his obedience to
his Father’s wish that he die out of simple consideration. Kafka
wrote of his father that “perhaps the strangest of all my

70
relationships with him is that I am capable of feeling and
suffering to the utmost not with him, but within him”26 For
Gregor and for his creator metamorphosis is a kind of secret
rescue from the loss of self into others, the attending alienation
a form of liberation even if it does no good.

Notes
22. Brod. p. 75
23. I am a Memory Come Alive, p. 55.
24. Quoted by Erich Heller in his Franz Kafka, Modern Masters
Series, Viking. p.1.
25. Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New
York: Schocken Paperback, 1971). p.89. All page references in the text
refer to this edition.
26. I am a Memory Come Alive. p. 93.

ALLEN THIHER ON MISREPRESENTATION IN

THE METAMORPHOSIS
Objects—pictures, newspapers, food—function by representing
within the text the inadequacy, if not the breakdown, of
representation. This concern with representation also informs
much of the way in which the Kafkan narrative unfolds; events,
attitudes, suppositions in “The Metamorphosis” are largely
grounded in misrepresentations. For example, after Gregor
awakes at the story’s beginning, he misrepresents his situation
to himself. He struggles to get up and catch a train, wanting to
believe that his newly acquired body is no more than a passing
affliction, like a cold; and at the end of the story he still dreams
at times of taking up his job again, of how with the next
opening of the door he might “take the family’s affairs in hand
just as he used to do” (125). The reader also learns, after
Gregor’s awakening reflection on his situation, that he may
have misrepresented his job security. As the head clerk storms
about before Gregor’s closed door, he yells that neither
Gregor’s security nor his reputation are as good as Gregor
thinks. These are not Gregor’s only delusions. It would appear
that his family’s situation, its capacity to get along without him

71
and to fend for itself, has been misrepresented to Gregor. His
father, it later appears, has some money set aside, and they are
all capable of working diligently to make ends meet.

The “Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis”

These misrepresentations are revealed in various ways, but
especially by metamorphoses, as we see when Gregor, who is
about to be judged by his father at the end of the second part,
looks up from his vermin’s point of view and sees the man
looming above him in his new uniform. This sickly father, who,
Gregor thought, was not capable of getting up in the evening,
is suddenly a transformed man, or, as Gregor notes in
astonishment, this was not the father he had imagined to
himself. “Now, however, he stood quite straight up, wearing a
tight, blue uniform with gold buttons, such as attendants in
banks wear. Over the high stiff collar of his coat flowed his
strong double chin. From under his bushy eyebrows pierced
forward sharply and attentively the stare of his dark eyes. His
usually disheveled white hair was combed down and parted in a
meticulous and precise glistening hair-style” (modified
translation of p.121).
Like Georg in “The Judgment,” Gregor has been guilty of
misrepresentations, and perhaps it is this implicit guilt that
underlies the hero’s fall and transforms Gregor’s father, like
Georg’s, into a judge, into a being of strength who can now
march on the once dominant son. There is no stability in this
tale of metamorphosis, however; none of the representations or
misrepresentations are certain and in the third part of the story
the father appears to have lost much of his power. He again
undergoes a metamorphosis as he sleeps evenings in his
uniform, soiling his coat, and becomes another victim of the
Dreck that covers everything. (Recall his appearance at the
story’s “happy end.”)
In the third part of the story, however, the key and
exemplary misrepresentation turns primarily on the sister. As a
prelude to his disappearance, Gregor indulges in a final fantasy
representation when he wants to bring his sister into his room.

72
Having hungered after the sustenance her violin playing
promises, longing for a spiritual nourishment that this parasite
without language cannot name, Gregor imagines how he might
give affectionate solace to his sister after her playing is rejected
by the three boarders. This fantasy of solace, whose incestuous
overtones continue a parody of sexual thematics, finds its
counterpart in Grete’s final interpretation of the vermin. As she
tells her mother and father: “You must just try to get rid of the
idea that this is Gregor. The fact that we’ve believed it for so
long is the root of all our trouble. But how can it be Gregor? If
this were Gregor, he would have realized long ago that human
beings can’t live with such a creature…”(134). Grete’s
interpretation is both true and false. Kafka is wreaking havoc
on the law of identity with the dialectic of misrepresentation.
By applying throughout the story the kind of dream logic that
allows one to be and not to be the same thing, to be Gregor
and to be non-Gregor the vermin, Kafka creates the possibility
for paradoxical misrepresentation at every level in “The
Metamorphosis.” And one may well see in this suspension of
the law of identity, if one wishes, a characterization of our
contemporary plight.

73
 Works By Franz Kafka

Meditation, 1912.
The Stoker: A Fragment, 1913.
The Metamorphosis, 1915.
The Judgment, 1916.
In the Penal Colony, 1919.
A Country Doctor, 1919.
A Hunger Artist: Four Stories, 1924.
The Trial, 1925.
The Castle, 1926.
Amerika, 1927.
The Great Wall of China, 1931.
The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces, 1933.
Before the Law, 1934.
Short Stories and Short Prose Pieces, 1935.
Description of a Struggle, 1936.
Parables, 1947.
In the Penal Settlement: Tales and Short Prose Works, 1949.
The Judgment and Other Stories, 1952.
Short Stories, 1952.
Wedding Preparations in the Country and Other Posthumous Prose,
1953.
Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, 1954.
Short Stories and Sketches, 1959.
He, 1963.
Collected Short Stories, 1970.
The Complete Short Stories, 1971.
The Metamorphosis: A Critical Edition, 1972.
I Am a Memory Come Alive, 1974.

74
 Annotated Bibliography
Adelman, Gary. “Beckett and Kafka.” In TriQuarterly 117
(Fall 2003): 77–107.
In this essay, Gary Adelman discusses the crossing influences
found in the work of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. He
addresses several works by Kafka, including “The
Metamorphosis,” and tries to locate each work’s presence in
Beckett’s fiction, poetry and drama.

Alter, Robert. “Kafka as Kabbalist.” In Salmagundi No. 98-99

(Spring-Summer 1993): 86–100.
In this essay, Robert Alter traces the Jewish mystic tradition
that can be found in Kafka’s fiction. He claims that Kafka
strove to capture the complex nature of man’s relation to
God.

Anderson, Mark M. Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism

in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992.
In this critical volume, Mark Anderson focuses on the
literary value of analyzing the ornaments and articles of
clothing referenced in many of Kafka’s fictions, including
“The Metamorphosis.” Other broad themes found in this
book include decadence, aestheticism, the “physiognomy of
guilt,” culture, politics and many others.

Ben-Ephraim, Gavriel. “Making and breaking meaning:

deconstruction, four-level allegory and ‘The Metamorphosis.’”
In The Midwest Quarterly 35.n4 (Summer 1994): 450–468.
In this essay, Ben-Ephraim discusses the allegory of the dung
beetle in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” suggesting
that its metaphysical nature proves problematic in the effort
to deconstruct the work.

75
Boa, Elizabeth. Kafka: Gender, Class, and Race in the Letters and
Fictions. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
In this critical volume, Elizabeth Boa addresses modernity,
feminism, race, law and many other significant themes of
literary discourse in the effort to analyze the rich, complex
nature of Kafka’s writing. In addition to “The Metamorphosis”
and other select works of short fiction, Boa focuses on Kafka’s
letters to Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenská, as well as the
unfinished novels The Trial and The Castle.

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Schocken

Books, 1947.
Although this biography has a nostalgic slant to it, its
perspective and importance are enhanced by the fact that
Brod was Kafka’s closest and most loyal friend. Many of
Kafka’s letters and unfinished manuscripts were left to Brod
following Kafka’s death.

Carrouges, Michel. Trans. By Emmett Parker. Kafka Versus

Kafka. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1968.
This intensive study focuses on many aspects of Kafka’s life
and works. It includes chapters on Kafka’s relationships with
his father and fiancée, as well as his sickness, internal
struggles, geopolitical conflicts, and faith.

Corngold, Stanley. Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press, 1988.
In this critical volume, Stanley Corngold, a prominent Kafka
scholar, provides extensive analysis on Kafka’s career, the
literary context within which he wrote, as well as his
particular method of writing. Corngold focuses on Kafka’s
influences, his critical reception, and important
considerations when engaging in serious Kafka study.

Flores, Angel. ed. The Kafka Debate : New Perspectives for Our
Time. Staten Island: Gordian Press, 1977.
This critical volume, edited by Angel Flores, contains several
original and reprinted essays from a wide range of Kafka

76
 scholars. The contents focus on such provocative themes as
Narcissism, radicalism, Marxism, rhetoric, and much more.

Gans, Jerome S. “Narrative lessons for the psychotherapist:

Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” In American Journal of
Psychotherapy 52.n3 (Summer 1998): 352–367.
In this essay, Jerome Gans makes the case for what
psychotherapists can gain from reading fiction, particularly
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” His essay uses “The
Metamorphosis” as an example of how the therapist’s
interaction with fiction can inform his/her experience with a
patient.

Harman, Mark. “Joyce and Kafka.” In The Sewanee Review

101.n1 (Winter 1993): 66–85.
Harman’s essay discusses the relationship between Irish and
Jewish literary history, making the connection between the
work and influences of Franz Kafka and the work and
influences of James Joyce.

Hughes, Kenneth, ed. Franz Kafka : an Anthology of Marxist

Criticism. Hanover: Clark University Press, 1981.
This critical anthology contains essays from a variety of
international Kafka scholars, each interpreting and
discussing Kafka’s life and work through a Marxist lens.
Kenneth Hughes is not only the editor of this volume, but
he has also translated many of the works contained within.

Pawel, Ernest. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka.

New York: Vintage Books, 1985.
In this text, Ernest Pawel offers a comprehensive study of
Franz Kafka’s life and influences, refraining from any heavy-
handed analysis of Kafka’s literary works.

Robertson, Ritchie. Kafka: Judaism, Literature and Politics.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Robertson traces what he considers to be the most
significant influences on Kafka’s fiction. He focuses on

77
 Kafka’s German Jewish background; the writers and
philosophers whose work had an impact on Kafka’s fiction
and the reception of his fiction; and the social and political
circumstances in Europe during the early twentieth century.

Sokel, Walter H. “Kafka as a Jew.” In New Literary History

30.4 (Autumn 1999): 837–854.
In this essay, Walter Sokel, a prominent Kafka scholar,
provides an analysis of Kafka’s literary technique,
concentrating on Jewish influences. He provides background
on the Jewish community in Prague, and influences from
Yiddish theater and German Jewish culture, all with a keen
eye on “The Metamorphosis.”

Sokel, Walter H. The Myth of Power and the Self: Essays on Franz
Kafka. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002.
This current critical volume, from one of the foremost
Kafka scholars, contains numerous essays on Kafka’s life and
work. It also has a comprehensive bibliography and index.

Stren, J.P., ed. The World of Franz Kafka. New York: Holt,
Rinheart and Winston, 1980.
This volume contains a number of essays by Kafka scholars,
focusing on varied angles of Kafka’s life and work. It also
contains over thirty illustrations of Kafka, his family, and
Prague.

Thiher, Allen. Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston:

Twayne Publishers, 1990.
Allen Thiher’s volume provides an in depth study of Kafka’s
short fiction. In addition to literary analysis, Thiher also
addresses some of Kafka’s autobiographical writing, and
provides a few extracts from contemporary Kafka
scholarship.

78
 Contributors
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s
Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s
Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975),
Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of
Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western
Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels,
Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973)
sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary
relationships between the great writers and their predecessors.
His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the
Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to
Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred
Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited
(2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and
Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor Bloom
received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters
Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the
International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of
Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize
of Denmark.

Aaron Tillman is a lecturer in the division of Arts and

Humanities at Babson College. His fiction has appeared in
Glimmer Train.

Mark M. Anderson has taught in the German department at

Columbia University. He has published several books including
The Broken Boat and In the Storm of Roses: Selected Poems by
Ingeborg Bachmann.

Stanley Corngold has been a professor of German and

Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is one of
the preeminent Kafka scholars, author of The Commentators’

79
Despair: The Interpretation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and editor
of an annotated critical edition of The Metamprphosis.

George Gibian has taught at Smith College. His publications

include the essay “Dichtung und Wahrheit: Three Versions of
Reality in Franz Kafka” which was published in The German
Quarterly.

M. Elizabeth Macandrew has taught at Columbia University

and has written about Richardson and Fielding. Her
publications include the essay “A Splacknuck and a Dung-
Beetle: Realism and Probability in Swift and Kafka” which was
published in College English.

Philip H. Rhein has taught at Vanderbilt University. His

publications include the book The Urge to Live: A Comparative
Study of Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Albert Camus’ L’etranger
and the essay “Two Fantastic Visions: Franz Kafka and Alfred
Kubin” which was published in the South Atlantic Bulletin.

Michael Rowe has been a clinical professor of sociology at Yale.

His publications have crossed genres, including an essay on
Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis: Defending the Human,” which
was published in Literature and Medicine.

Michael P. Ryan has written several articles on literature and

Eastern Philosophy, including “Kafka’s Die Söhne: The Range
and Scope of Metaphor” and “Samsa and Samsara: Suffering,
Death, and Rebirth in ‘The Metamorphosis’ ” which was
published in the German Quarterly.

Mark Spilka has taught at the University of Michigan. His

publications include the book Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual
Interpretation and the essay “Kafka’s Sources for ‘The
Metamorphosis’” which was published in Comparative Literature.

80
Peter Stine has taught at Wayne State University. His
publications include the essay “Franz Kafka and Animals”
which was published in Contemporary Literature.

Allen Thiher has been a professor of French at the University

of Missouri. He has written articles on modern literature,
philosophy and film. His books include Céline, The Novel as
Delerium, The Cinematic Muse and Words in Reflection: Modern
Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction.

81
 Acknowledgments
Anderson, Mark M. “Sliding Down the Evolutionary Ladder?:
Aesthetic Autonomy in The Metamorphosis.” In Kafka’s Clothes:
Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 125–126. © 1992 Mark
M. Anderson. Reprinted by permission of Oxford University
Press.

Corngold, Stanley. “The Metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of the

Metaphor.” In Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 57–58. © 1988 by
Cornell University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Gibeon, George. “Dichtung und Wahrheit: Three Versions of

Reality in Franz Kafka.” In The German Quarterly, Vol. 30,
No.1 (Jan., 1957), pp. 29–31. © 1957 by the American
Association of Teachers of German. Reprinted by permission.

Macandrew, M. Elizabeth. “A Splacknuck and a Dung-Beetle:

Realism and Probability in Swiftand Kafka.” In College
English, Vol. 31, No.4 (Jan., 1970), pp. 387–389. © 1970 by
the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted by
permission.

Rhein, Philip H. “Two Fantastic Visions: Franz Kafka and

Alfred Kubin.” In South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May,
1977), pp. 62–64. © 1977 by South Atlantic Modern
Language Association. Reprinted by permission.

Rowe, Michael. “Metamorphosis: Defending the Human.” In

Literature and Medicine, Vol. 21, No.2 (Fall 2002), pp.
267–268. © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reprinted by permission.

Ryan, Michael P. “Samsa and Samsara: Suffering, Death, and

Rebirth in ‘The Metamorphosis.’” In German Quarterly, 72.2

82
 (Spring 1999), pp. 136–137. © 1999 by the American
Association of Teachers of German. Reprinted by permission.

Spilka, Mark. “Kafka’s Sources for ‘The Metamorphosis.’ ” In

Comparative Literature, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1959), pp.
290–292. © 1959 by the University of Oregon. Reprinted by
permission.

Stine, Peter. “Franz Kafka and Animals.” In Contemporary

Literature, Vol. 22, No.1 (Winter, 1981), pp. 62–64. © 1981
by the University of Wisconsin Press. Reprinted by
permission.

Thiher, Allen. “ ‘ The Judgment’ and ‘The Metamorphosis.’ ”

In Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1990, pp. 48–50. © 1990 by the Gale Group, Inc.
Reprinted by permission of the Gale Group, Inc.

Every effort has been made to contact the owners of

copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles
appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in
their original publication with few or no editorial changes.
Those interested in locating the original source will find
bibliographic information in the bibliography and
acknowledgments sections of this volume.

83
 Index

A covenant, trust in, 25–28

abstract worlds, Kafka and Kubin crow figure, 12–15, 24–25
and, 56–58
“The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” 29 D
alienation, as theme, 59 death
allegories, oppression, 32 Gracchus and, 14
ambiguity, 11–12 of Gregor, 59
Amerika, 30 as liberation, 26–27
animals, portrayal of family and, as negation, 27
33–34 Painter, The, and, 57–58
Anna, character of, 36 death of Kafka, 11, 31
apples, 45, 55 Description of a Struggle, 29
assault on last earthly frontier, as Diamant, Dora, 30
metaphor, 10 Dickens, Charles, 66
authority, spiritual, 19–21 distance, 16
autonomy, efforts toward, 61 Dostoevsky, 66, 67
Double, The, 67–68
B doubles, Hoffmann and, 66
banality, 66–67 drudges, sympathy for, 66–67
Bauer, Felice, 30, 33 dung beetles, 33–34, 35, 37
beast fables, 16–19
beetles, 33–34, 35, 37 E
Bendemann, Georg, 63 employment, failure to maintain,
boatman, guilt and, 14 60–61
Brod, Max, 29, 33 emptiness, 7, 9, 26–27
Burgomaster of Riva, 12–15 Emrich, Wilhelm, 17, 26–27
evasion of interpretation, 11–12,
C 15–17, 21–25
caregiver role, power of, 61
“Cares of a Family Man, The,” F
16–19 fables, beast, 16–19
Cassell, Eric, 60 families
Castle, 9 as characteristic language, 51–52
Castle, The, 30 relationships and, 69–71
Charles Ferdinand University, 29 shame and, 33–34
charwoman, character of, 36 as theme, 59, 60
chief clerk, 36, 38–39 transformation of, 54–56
clocks, 59 family man, 16–19
cook, character of, 36 feminism, 32, 44
Corngold, Stanley, 33, 49, 50–52 food, changing interest in, 40–41
Country Doctor, A, 30 Frankists, 11, 22–23

84
Freud, Sigmund, 8, 18–19 Jewish tradition
frontier concept as metaphor, 10 cultural memory and, 22
furniture, removal of, 43–44 interpretation and, 7–12
interpretation of Negative and,
G 16
Gnosticism, 7–8, 20, 22–23, 26–28 Kafkan Negative and, 20–21
Gogol, Nikolai, 66–67, 68 as message, 15–16
Golyadkin, Yakov Petrovich, 68 mouse folk and, 24–25
Gracchus, crow figure and, 12–15 spiritual authority and, 19–20
“Great Wall of China, The,” 30 “Josephine the Singer and the
guilt, 11–12, 33–34, 53 Mouse Folk,” 22, 24–25, 31
Gymnasium of Prague, 29 “Judgment, The,” 30, 52–53, 72–73

H K
heavenly assault on Kafka, as Kabbalah, 8, 10–11, 21, 22–23
metaphor, 10 Kafka, Franz
Hebrew, study of, 14–15, 21 Alfred Kubin, comparison with,
heretics, 22–23 56–59
hierarchy, authority and, 19 death of, 11, 31
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 65, 66, 68 life of, 29–31
humanity, employment and, 60–61 predecessors and, 65–69
hunger, 40–41 Kafka, Hermann, 29, 32
Hunger Artist, A, 30, 31 Kafka, Julie, 29
“Hunter Gracchus, The,” 12–15, 30 Kenoma, 7, 8, 9
Klopstock, Robert, 15
I Kubin, Alfred, comparison with,
ideas, pursuit of, 10, 14–15 56–59
illness, transformation and, 60
illustration, impossibility of, 26, L
49–50 language, as metaphor, 50
“Imperial Message, An,” 15–16 laws, 22, 23–24, 26
inadequacy, 53 “Letter to my Father,” 29, 30, 34
incest, 59, 61, 73 liberation, death as, 26–27
independence, 45 life, purpose of, 18–19
injury, 45 literalization, metaphors and, 49
interpretation “Little Fable, A,” 27–28
evasion of, 11, 26–27 lodgers, characters of, 36
refusal of, 21–25, 49–50 logic, reality and, 56
invalid state, reversal of, 54–55 Luria, Isaac, 10–11
irony, 70
isolation, as theme, 59 M
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The,
J 24
jackdaw. See Crow meaning, truth and, 26–27
Jesenská, Milena, 7, 8, 30 Meditation, 29

85
mercilessness, 33 psychological transformation, 60
Messianism, 27 pursuit of ideas, 10, 14–15
metaphors, 10, 49–50, 50–52
misrepresentation, 71–73 R
mouse folk, 24–25 rage, interpretation and, 26
Rahv, Philip, 65
N reality
names, significance of, 62–64 Freud and, 27
“Nature Theater of Oklahoma, lack of, 52–53, 71–73
The,” 30 recognition of, 70
negative unreality and, 56–57
destruction of, 51 rebellions, as theme, 59
distance and, 16 religion, importance of name and,
image of, 26, 49–50 62–64
Josephine the singer and, “Report to the Academy, A,” 30
24–25 repression, 14, 18–19
Kafkan, 20–21 reversal, significance of, 54–56
Odradek and, 18–19 Ryan, Michael P., 33
neglect, 45–46
nobility, laws and, 22–23 S
“Nose, The,” 68 Sabbatarians, 11, 22–23
salesmen, 35, 37
O salvation, Gnosticism and, 8
Odradek, 16–19 Samsa, Gregor, 26–27, 35
Olam, 20 Samsa, Grete
oppression, metamorphosis as, abandonment by, 47
42–43 assistance from, 41
oral Torah, 15 misrepresentation of, 72–73
originality, 32 overview of, 35
power of caregiver role and, 61
P transformation of, 44, 58
Painter, The, 57–58 Samsa, importance of name, 62–64
Palestine, journey to, 15 Samsa, Mr.
paradoxes, laws and, 23–24 increasing importance of, 54–56
parasitism, Samsa home and, 42 misrepresentation of, 72
paterfamilias, 16–19 overview of, 35
Pawel, Ernst, 21 struggle with, 63
“Penal Colony, In the,” 30 transformation of, 44–45
Pharisees, 23, 24 Samsa, Mrs., overview of, 35–36
plot, summary of, 37–48 Samsara, 62–64
Politzer, Heinz, 15–16 Samson, 63–64
predecessors of Kafka, importance satire, Metamorphosis as, 27
of, 65–69 Scholem, Gersholm, 8, 10–11, 23
“Problem of Our Laws, The,” shame, 33–34, 43, 59, 60
21–24 sin without guilt, 11–12

86
solitude, enforced, 9 U
Spanish Influenza, the, 30 uniforms, importance of, 54–55, 72
Spilka, Mark, 32–33
spiritual authority, reasons for, V
19–21 Van den Berg, J.H., 14
Starke, Ottomar, 50 vermin, 49
Stine, Peter, 33–34 violin, 36, 46, 73
“Stoker, The,” 30 vision, changing, 42–43
Straus, Nina Pelikan, 32 visual representation, impossibility
suffering, 33, 62
of, 26, 49–50
survival, as theme, 60
W
T
“Wedding Preparations in the
Talmud, 14, 15, 16
Country,” 29
temporal nature of changes, as
theme, 61 Workers’ Accident Insurance
themes, 59–61 Institute, 29, 30
three Lodgers, characters of, 36 writer’s block, 69
Torah, 14, 15 writing, covenant of, 25–28
transcendence, Gnosticism
without, 27–28 Y
transformation, 52–53, 54–56 Yaweh, 19–20
transmigration, suffering and, 62 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 25
Trial, The, 30
truth, meaning and, 26–27 Z
tuberculosis, 15, 30 Zionism, 9, 10–11, 21

87