The Metamorphosis

"Metamorphosis," by Franz Kafka, W.W. Norton 7 Co., 2014 edition, translated by Susan Bernofsky, 128 pages
Reviewed by Angela Allen, July 17, 2020

It’s gobsmacking and in a way, refreshing, that Franz Kafka’s little 100-page novella, “Metamorphosis,” continues to provoke us a century after it was published (of course there are many classics that do that). The book is simple to read, yet so complex in its ideas. It’s a tragedy, a comedy, an existential treatise.

Though dark — and I’m sure many of you have read it and some of you detested it — the book brings up issues of personal freedom, emotional voids, and the big existential one: Could unfulfilled salesman Gregor Samsa have changed and chosen his fate and freedom? It’s certainly a precursor to "Death of a Salesman."

The family earner, Samsa wakes up a bug one day and dies a bug while starving himself after his family becomes thoroughly repulsed, and totally ignores him. But he had a bummer of a life as a human being, too. Some critics and readers argue he remains a human being, the same human being throughout the transformation despite his lack of voice, multiple skinny legs and carapace, which is injured when his father throws apples at him.

I did my share of laughing. The story is told from Gregor’s point of view, so it’s funny and bizarre seeing how a bug perceives things. Kafka insisted that the book not have a bug on its cover; he didn’t want readers to have preconceived ideas.

I read it again for an online seminar on “The Ethics of Ambiguity.” We are also reading Simone de Beauvoir, so it’s pretty heady stuff.