The Metamorphosis Dehumanization Analysis

In today’s society, it is hard to overcome being just a number. Within work and school, society teaches to follow the crowd and obey authority. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is a novella detailing a man’s absurd transformation from human to bug. Gregor Samsa goes from being mentally dehumanized in his working life to being physically and literally dehumanized. This metamorphosis affects not only Gregor, but his entire family. His family is burdened with the maintenance of a domesticated bug living amongst them but they also suffer from the loss of income that Gregor once provided through his work as a salesman. The last paragraph is not only a telling of the effects Gregor’s death has on the rest of the family, but of the entire Samsa family’s transformation when freed from his burden. However, although freed, the Samsa family is doomed to the same working-class dehumanization that Gregor once suffered from. Consequently, Kafka intends to show the perpetual cycle of dehumanization of the working class through the story of Gregor Samsa. To begin, after Gregor dies, the Samsa family’s only concern is forgetting him and focusing on the prospect hope. Towards the end of the novel, the Samsa family utterly forgets Gregor as if the story of the Metamorphosis never happened. The last paragraph …show more content…
The character’s live in a world where employment does not always guarantee individuality, rather, it strips and alienates workers from being their own selves. The story uses the symbol of a bug to convey the capitalistic society that the world is consumed by. The analogy of the bug represents how unappreciated Gregor was as a worker and how he can be left behind without consequence. In the end, the rest of Gregor’s family transforms into a projection of what he once was, dooming each of them to the fate of a living as a small-being in an uncaring, capitalistic