I must break through the mimetic to analyze this text more deeply. I can recall how much I despised this text the first time I read it. I read it as a teen for a school assignment. It was part of my historical fiction, classic text period. I remember being disgusted by the talk of a thorax and the exoskeleton. Still to this day I have wondered why Kafka never really had us feel the actual transformation from man to bug. As a creative writer, I would have written of skin tightening and hardening, likening it to the way your skin can get tight through a sunburn. I would have wanted to feel the antennas forcing it their way like blistered bubbles that sprout. Example my own metamorphosis story, Midwifery and the Metamorphosis: |
Before our eyes, he grew into a beautifully repugnant beast. His eyes were of piercing ruby radiance. Copper horns burgeon from his thick black hair. His wings grew thick strong and leathery. His tail budded from a large boil on his hind.
Lloyd, Regina. "Midwifery and the Metamorphisis." Separate Worlds. Spectacular Publishing, July-Aug. 2013. Web. <http://www.speculativefictionstories.com/> |
But it revealed to me there is something Kafka is saying by NOT SAYING IT, he is not dramatizing this transformation for a reason. Kafka, wants the reader to be surprised by the fact that Gregor Samsa is not shocked to realize he is a bug. He is "waking up" from the realization that he had lived so inhuman an existence that his transformation was not that of a man who went to bed and woke up a bug, rather that of a man who was always callousing his skin into exoskeleton. This is the syllogistic progressive form at play. Kafka is hinting at the question, why doesn't this man react to the transformation? And I found the passage below: |
The rest of the text goes on to show that as Gregor is becoming outwardly the animal/bug, inwardly he is dealing with his own humanity. He is first surrounded by physical needs, insatiable hunger, the changing atmosphere of his room, thirst. Then the need for communication, acceptance understanding. It is in his bug existence that he feels the lack of love, that he ignored in his human form. He was useful as a man, in providing for his family, but as a bug without the ability to provide, he realized their inability to love him. As for qualitative progressive form, the quality at play is annoyance, boredom, zombie-like. The reader wants to see Gregor be passionate about something. We want him to say, I got a raw deal. It is incredibly frustrating to read, because we want him to care that he is a bug. We want him to feel more in his life. He is going through the motions and never actually reacting to anything except the biological needs. I am drawn to my first discussion of communication. It is through out the book repeatedly this lack of communication. The constant examples of an inability to communicate, miscommunications and ignorance, clearly are speaking to the repetitive form. I have outlined some of them in the quotations below: Perhaps you haven't seen the latest orders ~Clerk |
Did you understand even a word? ~Clerk
Apparently his words were no longer understandable, even though they were clear enough to him, clearer than before ~Gregor
Perhaps this custom of reading that the sister had told him about and wrote of in her letters had been discontinued~ Gregor
(What is this of reading and writing? Professor Kopp would say this is a message straight to the reader- about reading and writing from Kafka) |
because as no one could understand him, no one thought, including the sister, that he could understand them
Wait I must explore this thought- forgive me for my switch but what if this too is about writing? When we read, we assume we can understand the writer but never that he can understand us! The reader is the bug that can not communicate but only receive the message. But wait if you are Kafka and writing absurdist fiction- YOU are the bug, able to understand the thing the sister "reader" can not. What if he is saying "be the bug- the authorial audience? not just the ideal audience of the sister. - This must be explored in my next post! The role the family plays as audience! |
The effect of the literary devices employed is to have the reader draw conclusions of the actual intent of the writer. Kafka doesn't want to tell us his exact message, he wants the reader to be the audience that will find their own message |