Cit@tions

Surprisingly, Gregor’s bizarre new state is not the central transformation in the novel. Instead, Kafka uses Gregor’s surreal change as a catalyst for an almost more shocking metamorphosis: that of Gregor’s family, as they move from helplessness and sympathetic fear to emancipation and hostile rejection. A hostile rejection that was caused some five years before, old Samsa lost most of his money, whereupon his son Gregor took a job with one of his father's creditors and became a traveling salesman in cloth. His father then stopped working altogether, his sister Grete was too young to work, his mother was ill with asthma; thus young Gregor not only supported the whole family but also found for them the apartment they are now living in. This apartment, a flat in an apartment house, in Charlotte Street to be exact, is divided into segments as he will be divided himself.
It’s a telling detail that neither Gregor nor his family wonder why or how he’s turned into an insect. Upon discovering his state, Gregor’s mother sobs and later faints, while his father reacts with great anger. However, they make no attempt to change him back. Gregor does want to find a “cure”, but must give up almost from the start, when he loses his ability to speak.Also, he saw tremendous irony in the fact that our human lives are so transitory and our fortunes so subject to the whims of fate, and yet most people act as if we will live forever with ultimate control over the progress of their existence. In his story "The Metamorphosis," Kafka presents a conventional, respectable protagonist whose life is suddenly and permanently changed by a physical disability -- a "metamorphosis," or transformation -- which catapults him out of his efficacious complacency into a sudden confrontation with the greater questions of existence. This transformation, because it affects the way society looks at the protagonist, also effects a telling effect upon his self-image and spiritual identity. The ambiguities of Kafka's language do not suggest that Gregor becomes more spiritual or that Grete gets anywhere once she replaces her brother. his metamorphosis also marks Gregor's freedom as an individual. Throughout his entire life, he has let other people make his decisions for him (Greenburg 274). This is the first occurrence in his life over which no one (including he) had any control. This metamorphosis allows his hidden self to emerge, the self that had been stifled for so many years (Friedman 270). Gregor is no longer the head of the household or the working man, but a creature representing his true personality (Parry 263). Gregor was never really "alive" as the head of the house. Even if he had eventually paid off his family's debt, by that time his life would have been wasted (Friedman 272). But in actuality, Gregor's death comes not as a human but as an insect, when the family he once support and came to rely upon completely neglects him (Parry 264).In the labyrinth of exchanges that dominates the text, exchange of powers may replicate exchange of identity and exchange of gender but not imply, in the exchange of sister for brother, the spiritual transformation of either.Look at where his values were anchored: servant to the needs of an oppressive boss in order to meet the needs of an exploitative family. So, he ceases to serve. With new values opposing those of the family, the employer, and society at large, Gregor emerges as a deviant. He has entered the world of the despised.