The Metamorphosis is actually pretty straightforward.
Stories are like a mirror. Or a Rorschach test.
We come to them looking for different things, so it’s no surprise that every one of us can find a different meaning. Or, if you’re Richard Dawkins, maybe you find no meaning.
It’s actually kind of obvious what The Metamorphosis is about. There’s a perfectly straightforward point, requiring no unraveling of metaphor, no deciphering of allegory, no advanced literary criticism, and no rocket science. It’s about a man losing his job after becoming infirm. The end.
What you take away from stories depends entirely on who you are. It shouldn’t come as any surprise then that anyone with job security will fail to understand the point of The Metamorphosis, and those in closer contact with labor struggles will find the intention painfully clear.
It’s interesting that Richard Dawkins didn’t see that, looking into the Rorshach test of Kafka, but maybe for him, it’s been decades since he’s faced job insecurity. The point of the story is very plain in the opening pages, so much so that as the “short” story continues over three parts and more than sixty pages, it’s really becoming quite belabored by the end. By the middle, even.
“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Those are the opening words of the story. Apologies for the spoiler, but it is the first sentence. Hilariously, though, Gregor’s thoughts hardly linger on the strangeness of having turned into an insect; instead, he thinks about how much he dislikes his job and how much trouble he will be in when he arrives late today. He wonders if he can catch the next train.
How relatable is that? If you turned into a bug tomorrow, and your first worry was whether you could get to work on time to avoid reprimand, that says a lot about the strains and pressures of the job. And it’s fair that Richard Dawkins might not have the life experiences to pick up on that hilarity.
“For the moment, though, I’d better get up, since my train goes at five.”
There’s your surreal absurdism, as ordered.
“He looked at the alarm clock ticking on the chest. Heavenly Father! he thought. It was half-past six o’clock and the hands were quietly moving on, it was even past the half-hour, it was getting on toward a quarter to seven. Had the alarm clock not gone off? The next train went at seven o’clock; to catch that he would need to hurry like mad and his samples weren’t even packed up, and he himself wasn’t feeling particularly fresh and active. And even if he did catch the train he wouldn’t avoid a row with the chief, since the firm’s porter would have been waiting for the five o’clock train and would have long since reported his failure to show up.”
What a thing to worry about when you’ve been transformed into an insect. What does that say about the state of our work lives, that if we were to be transformed like Gregor our first worry would be getting scolded by our boss?
Gregor is preoccupied with how much he dislikes his work, how he would be sacked if he didn’t work so hard, and how he would quit if he didn’t have to take care of his parents. The absurdity should be clear as he continues to lament that he can’t get out of the bed and noting the times of the train that he has missed, hoping to get up and catch the next one, despite the fact that he has transformed into a giant bug.
It isn’t rocket science to figure out The Metamorphosis. It’s not a metaphor for anything. The fact that Gregor has turned into an insect doesn’t matter. What matters is the pervasive pressure of working and supporting his elderly parents and the fact that this preoccupation with keeping food on the table is so pervasive that he hardly gives a thought to the personal impact of having turned into an insect; his worries are purely practical and cling to the fear of how his family will earn an income, first, foremost, and solitarily.
“This getting up early, he thought, makes one quite stupid. A man needs his sleep. Other commercials live like harem women. For instance, when I come back to the hotel of a morning to write up the orders I’ve got, these others are only sitting down to breakfast. Let me just try that with my chief; I’d be sacked on the spot. Anyhow, that might be quite a good thing for me, who can tell? If I didn’t have to hold my hand because of my parents I’d have given notice long ago, I’d have gone to the chief and told him exactly what I think of him.”
I’ll quote it again: “I’d be sacked on the spot.” That fear is the core of the story. Easy peasy.
All of literary theory comes up against the problem of the book’s interaction with the reader and the infinite variability of the readers’ life experiences. It should come as no surprise that what one reader gets out of a work of fiction is entirely different from another. We all have different life experiences, and we all search books for meaning in different ways, with different intentions.
Zadie Smith had a lot to take from The Metamorphosis, after analyzing a quotation from a letter Kafka wrote in 1921 stating, “Most young Jews who began to write German wanted to leave Jewishness behind them, and their fathers approved of this, but vaguely (this vagueness was what was outrageous to them). But with their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground. The ensuing despair became their inspiration.”
Check out what Zadie Smith made of that, from her back jacket cover quotation on the Pantheon Random House 2013 edition of The Metamorphosis and Other Stories:
“Kafka’s survey of the insectile situation of young Jews in inner Bohemia can hardly be improved upon: ‘With their posterior legs they were still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their wavering anterior legs they found no new ground.’ There is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We’re all insects, all Ungeziefer, now.”
Dawkins was the subject of much mockery and trolling for his bad take, or failure to conceive of any take, on The Metamorphosis, other than “I don’t get it, it must be bad.” The Emperor’s New Clothes? It feels as if he hasn’t even turned to his neighbors to ask whether or not they can see the emperor’s clothes, he’s just assumed that they do. Maybe the emperor is naked, but we all know he’s naked. That is, that The Metamorphosis doesn’t require decoding. The meaning is as plain as the nose on Richard Dawkins’s face.
“The boy thinks of nothing but his work.” Same. Most of us are in this boat. Most of us can get The Metamorphosis, no brain surgery required.
Two takeaways for #writers: I enjoy so much how Franz just tells us the scenario, straight up, in the first sentence. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” An important piece of writing advice for novices working to be surreal: just say it. Just tell us the situation. Whether in the first sentence or at the end of a puzzling opening paragraph, don’t be afraid to just tell the audience the scenario. There’s no rule that says good writing can’t involve clearly and plainly stating the situation. Gregor Samsa has turned into an insect. That’s it. That’s the story. I feel like in any creative writing workshop on the earth, a story like this would be told slanted, coming at it sideways, refusing to just state what on earth is going on. My deepest respects to Franz Kafka for telling us simply and straight up what’s happened to Gregor.
The second point for writers (take from it what you will):
I have a confession to make. So far, I don’t exactly enjoy reading Kafka. When I read his novels, I get his point on page one, and three hundred pages remain. If only The Metamorphosis were flash fiction.
I felt everything I needed to feel while reading The Trial in the first half of the novel, and then it went on, and on, and on, to belabor the point. Most books that bend my mind make me want to immediately read them a second time. Not so, The Trial. I never plan to read it again. I got it. I felt as if I got everything I needed out of it in one go.
Part of the point is that the intention is not to understand, to translate an analogy into literality, to debug or puzzle the pieces together; once it’s clear that the matter or what the crime was and whether the man on trial committed it will never be addressed, everything ceases to matter, and what we’re left with is a joke.
A seemingly unending one.
