Change In Kafka's Metamorphosis Essay

What if one day you awoke from troubled dreams and ascertained that you were transformed into an enormous bug? What if you thought it was just a vision and continued to sleep? What if you wake up and your vision was true? What do you do? If you are Gregor Samsa you don't question it but instead continue with your daily rut.
Kafka’s Metamorphosis is, as the name suggests, a story about evolving. From the moment that Gregor Samsa awakes from his ‘troubled dreams’, the theme unfolds. The protagonist finds himself ‘transformed in his bed into an enormous bug’; a change so drastic that it is absurd. Yet, no attention is paid to his physical change. Change happens in all of the main characters: Gregor’s sister molds from a child to a mature young woman; his parents are forced to transpose their roles in order to survive.
However, I believe that change does not define Metamorphosis, but the lack of it: stagnation. Although Gregor’s physical body changes so extremely that it is unrecognisable as a human form, the protagonist’s mind fails to change over the course of the story. Gregor addresses life after the metamorphosis, in a similar manner as to life before it; in fact Gregor ignores the change of his physical body, spending a …show more content…
Even before the metamorphosis the man was already a ‘bug’. Gregor lacked friends, failing to even accomplish a relationship with his own family. In short: his life was futile, his body merely an empty shell. The physical change, the metamorphosis, marks the unraveling of Gregor’s veil; a chance for the world to finally see Gregor for what he really is. Gregor, only accepts the metamorphosis at face value; failing to acknowledge the significance of the change. To put it crudely, Gregor is a ‘closet insect’, in so much denial that he fails to even perceive the closet around