The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka speaks personally to me. On some levels, I can relate to Gregor Samsa. First, Gregor Samsa is a fictional character, and I am a fictional character. We were both human and then we changed. In Gregor’s case, the change was a monstrous verminous bug that fits the description of a cockroach. I am now a mouse.
Gerald Freund, fictional character in mouse form
Gregor Samsa, fictional character
in verminous bug form
I suppose that between the two, you might think I got the better deal. That is only natural. At first glance, many would rather be a cute white and brown mouse rather than a giant cockroach. Keep in mind, however, that cockroaches can do some amazing things like run around without a head and survive a nuclear holocaust. How well do you think you or I would survive a beheading or a nuclear winter? Not well at all.
What’s wrong with being a mouse, you might ask. Plenty of things I can assure you. Unlike the giant cockroaches, mice are small, fragile things with a short lifespan. I am constantly crapping and urinating, which is quite inconvenient. I often ill and stressed. Prone to many eye infections. I don’t believe insects get eye infections.
In the short story Metamorphosis, Gregor woke up with anxious dreams, discovering that he was a bug. Despite this transformation, Gregor appears more preoccupied by his career choice of a traveling salesman and its difficulties: stresses of selling, worries about train connections, getting up early and lack of sleep. Therein lie additional differences between Gregor and I. He is a traveling salesman, and by his own description, an unexceptional one, grinding through each day, working harder, yet a step behind the other salesman. I, however, am a well regarded, if not well known, professor of natural history.
In fact, Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis might not have been real. It might be considered a metaphor for an existential crisis, the result of his occupation, perhaps. The crisis which caused him to behave in a way that elicited all sorts of negative reactions from his family. His sister shows him some sympathy for his hopelessness and despair represented as a bug. I, on the other hand, have experienced a genuine transformation and am not at all alienated. At least I am as connected as a German who fled to the West as young boy before the wall went up, who has no surviving relatives, except a aging, comatose mother could be.
An even with our differences, I feel an affinity for Gregor. Our mutual fictional experience of metamorphosis blurs our differences and provides a common bonds as cockroach and mouse.
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