THE METAMORPHOSIS

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

[Name of the Institute]

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) By Franz Kafka, 1915

One night in September 1912, in a single eight-hour sitting, Franz Kafka wrote "The Judgment" ("Das Urteil"). It was his first successfully completed longer work. “This is the only way to write," Kafka noted in his diary, "with such cohesion, with such total opening of body and soul." At this point he felt encouraged to approach the novel form once more. On September 25 Kafka began the second version of Amerika. Between November 17 and December 6 he interrupted his work on the novel to write "The Metamorphosis" ("Die Verwandlung"), which was published in October 1915. Because of its proximity to "The Judgment" and "The Stoker" (the first chapter of the incomplete Amerika novel)—stories in which the father-son conflict is prominent—"The Metamorphosis" has often been read as yet another psychological conte à clef in which Kafka works out his complicated relationship with his own father (Jarvis, 2008).

"The Metamorphosis" centers on a son who takes over the role of the father as caretaker of the family, finds himself transformed into an enormous insect, and is left to die in his room by his visibly revived family. In much of the critical literature Gregor Samsa's transformation into a giant bug is taken one of three ways: to signify his sense of guilt and desire for punishment for having usurped the role of the father, to symbolize both a libidinous rebellion and the condemnation of such a rebellion, or to represent a rebellious assertion of unconscious desires and energies that are identical with the primitive and infantile demands of the id. Yet despite their profusion and persistence psychological readings of "The Metamorphosis" remain unsatisfactory because they leave too much unexplained.

Theodor W. Adorno, by contrast, recommended "the principle of literalness," an approach to Kafka that seems to go to the heart of "The Metamorphosis." "The first rule," wrote Adorno, "is take everything literally; cover up nothing with concepts invoked from above…. Only fidelity to the letter … can help." Thus we are inescapably confronted with the story's famous first sentence: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." Despite the strange nonchalance with which Gregor accepts his transformation, the course of the story makes clear that "it was no dream."

The story's first part ...