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Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 1, 2023

“As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” So begins The Metamorphosis , a sinister allegory of dehumanization and hopelessness in the modern world by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Once rendered an insect, Gregor becomes a functionless and embarrassing eyesore in a household, whose members grow to resent and neglect him to the point of death. There is no place in domestic, social, and professional life, Kafka’s tale suggests, for the unproductive and the nonconformist.

Written in 1912, The Metamorphosis was one of the few works Kafka published in his lifetime. Owing to the author’s general reluctance to publish and editorial reservations about the story’s bizarre content, The Metamorphosis did not go to press until 1915.

Like much of Kafka’s fiction, The Metamorphosis expresses dominant themes in the author’s own life. In a letter, Kafka mentioned the similarity between Samsa’s name and his own; both writer and character, furthermore, were pressured to take on largely pointless office jobs. Kafka’s anxieties about ill health and fear of physical collapse play out in the unfortunate Gregor, who dies from a wound inflicted on him by his father. But the story resonates most profoundly with the real circumstances of Kafka’s family life. Like his creation, Gregor, Kafka was continually berated by his imposing father, who considered his only son to be an unmitigated failure. Gregor, likewise, cowers in fear of his father, who finds him repulsive and attacks him at every turn. Although Kafka had earned a law degree in part to appease his father, he would remain an object of patriarchal disdain and repudiation—particularly in light of his fictional work, which his father deemed “a waste of time.” Kafka’s mother, like her alter ego in the story, was ever-deferential to her husband and offered little solace to her son; his sister, Ottla, was normally a compassionate ally, but on one occasion she joined the parents in insisting that Kafka increase his hours at the office; shortly thereafter, Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor’s sister betrays him by insisting that the family get rid of him.

In addition to these autobiographical references, The Metamorphosis alludes to a number of literary works, including the Russian Nikolay Gogol’s The Nose, in which a man wakes up to find his nose missing; preposterously, the nose goes on to attain a high-ranking position in the civil service. Kafka’s text was also inspired by a Yiddish play, Gordin’s The Savage One. Kafka wrote extensively about the play in his diaries. All of the characters in The Metamorphosis find analogues in The Savage One. Gregor Samsa’s counterpart is an idiot son, who is unable to communicate with his family, stays locked in his room, and fears the wrath of his father. The Metamorphosis, furthermore, resembles Gordin’s drama in its entirely domestic setting and episodic narrative structure. All three texts connect materialism and status consciousness with the degradation of humanity.

In alignment with Kafka’s largely cynical philosophical views, The Metamorphosis supports a decidedly pessimistic interpretation of human nature. Speaking to his friend Max Brod, Kafka once explained that he thought human beings were God’s nihilistic thoughts. Brod asked whether there was hope elsewhere in the universe. To this, Kafka replied, “plenty of hope, for God—only not for us.” This dismal prognosis, a sense of terminal confinement, is represented by Gregor, whose only alternative to the world in which he has unintentionally entered is death. There are glimmers of hope in the concluding lines of The Metamorphosis, as the Samsa family sets about reconstructing itself, but this might also be seen to indicate the unfortunate perpetuation of the worst human qualities. In any case, after the story’s publication Kafka said that he regretted this ending, insisting that it was “unreadable.”

Along with the bleak determinism of The Metamorphosis , the surrealistic scenario depicted—its particular mixture of the impossible and the real—is typically “Kafkaesque.” In several works, Kafka posits an unlikely situation and portrays its development in realistic detail, both psychologically and materially. In his novel The Trial , for example, a man is accused and found guilty of a crime without ever being informed of the charge’s precise nature; in “Before the Law,” a man passes decades waiting to enter the gates of Justice, only to have the guardian, finally, close them in his face. The realist aspect of these texts encourages the reader to probe beyond the specific circumstance—a man, for example, literally becoming an insect—to uncover its symbolic and allegorical implications.

The image of the insect is evocative on several levels. As early as 1907, Kafka described the best part of his creative self as a “beautiful beetle”; he imagined his body moving around in the world while his “true writing self”—a beetle—remained behind. In later years, when his idealism faded, this authorial image was replaced by “filth and slime,” a phrase he applied to his piece “The Judgment” (it tells of a rebellious son condemned to suicide by his father). Gregor Samsa, a giant insect who becomes progressively more and more filthy, may be interpreted as a metaphor for disillusionment.

Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Novels

Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Stories

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bridgewater, Patrick. Kafka’s Novels: An Interpretation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Greenberg, Martin. The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Stern, J. P., ed. The World of Franz Kafka. New York: Holt, Rinehard, 1980. Weinberg, Helen. The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.

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A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Metamorphosis’ is a short story (sometimes classed as a novella) by the Czech-born German-language author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It is his best-known shorter work, published in German in 1915, with the first English translation appearing in 1933. ‘The Metamorphosis’ has attracted numerous interpretations, so it might be worth probing this fascinating story more closely.

You can read ‘The Metamorphosis’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Kafka’s story below.

Plot Summary

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. Although he briefly considers this transformation, he quickly turns his thoughts to his work and his need to provide for his parents (he lives with them and his sister) so that they can pay off their debts. He also thinks about how much he hates travelling.

He realises he is already late for work, but hesitates to call in sick because he has never had a day off sick before, and knows this might raise alarm bells. When he responds through the bedroom door after his mother calls to him, he realises that his voice has become different as a result of his metamorphosis into an insect. When his family try to enter his bedroom, they find the door locked, and he refuses to let them in.

Then there’s a knock at the door and it’s the chief clerk for whom Gregor works, wondering where Gregor has got to.

Still Gregor refuses to open the door to his family or to his visitor. The chief clerk is affronted and tells Gregor through the door that his work has not been good enough and his position at the company may not be safe. Gregor seeks to defend himself, and assures the clerk that he will soon return to work. However, because Gregor’s voice has changed so much since his transformation, nobody can understand what he’s saying.

Gregor opens the door and his mother screams when she sees him. He asks the chief clerk to smooth things over at the office for him, explaining his … sudden metamorphosis into an insect.

Later that evening, having swooned and dozed all day, Gregor wakes up at twilight and finds that his sister had brought him milk with some bread in it. Gregor attempts to drink the milk, but finds the taste disgusting, so he leaves it. He climbs under the couch so his family don’t have to look at him, while his sister tries to find him food that he can eat.

Gregor overhears his family talking in the other room, and discovers that, despite their apparent debts, his parents have some money stashed away. He has been going to work to support them when he didn’t have to.

As well as the changes to his voice, Gregor also realises that his vision has got worse since his transformation. He also discovers that he enjoys climbing the walls and the ceiling of his bedroom. To help him, his sister gets rid of the furniture to create more space for him to climb; Gregor’s mother disagrees and is reluctant to throw out all of Gregor’s human possessions, because she still trusts that he will return to his former state one day.

When he comes out of the room, his mother faints and his sister locks him outside. His father arrives and throws apples at him, severely injuring him, because he believes Gregor must have attacked his own mother.

After his brush with death, the family change tack and vow to be more sympathetic towards Gregor, agreeing to leave the door open so he can watch them from outside the room as they talk together. But when three lodgers move in with the family, and his room is used to store all of the family’s furniture and junk, he finds that he cannot move around any more and goes off his food. He becomes shut off from his family and the lodgers.

When he hears his sister playing the violin for the lodgers, he opens the door to listen, and the lodgers, upon spotting this giant insect, are repulsed and declare they are going to move out immediately and will not pay the family any of their rent owed. Gregor’s sister tells her parents that they must get rid of their brother since, whilst they have tried to take care of him, he has become a liability. She switches from talking about him as her brother and as an ‘it’, a foreign creature that is unrecognisable as the brother they knew.

Gregor, overhearing this conversation, wants to do the right thing for his family, so he decides that he must do the honourable thing and disappear. He crawls off back to his room and dies.

Gregor’s family is relieved that he has died, and the body is disposed of. Mr Samsa kicks the lodgers out of the apartment. He, his wife, and their daughter are all happy with the jobs they have taken, and Mr and Mrs Samsa realise that their daughter is now of an age to marry.

The one thing people know about ‘The Metamorphosis’ is that it begins with Gregor Samsa waking up to find himself transformed into an insect. Many English translations use the word in the book’s famous opening line (and we follow convention by using the even more specific word ‘beetle’ in our summary of the story above).

But the German word Ungeziefer does not lend itself easily to translation. It roughly denotes any unclean being or creature, and ‘bug’ is a more accurate rendering of the original into English – though even ‘bug’ doesn’t quite do it, since (in English anyway) it still suggests an insect, or at least some sort of creepy-crawly.

For this reason, some translators (such as David Wyllie in the one we have linked to above) reach for the word vermin , which is probably closer to the German original. Kafka did use the word Insekt in his correspondence discussing the book, but ordered that the creature must not be explicitly illustrated as such at any cost. The point is that we are not supposed to know the precise thing into which Gregor has metamorphosed.

The vagueness is part of the effect: Gregor Samsa is any and every unworthy or downtrodden creature, shunned by those closest to him. Much as those who wish to denigrate a particular group of people – immigrants, foreigners, a socio-economic underclass – often reach for words like ‘cockroaches’ or ‘vermin’, so Gregor’s transformation physically enacts and literalizes such emotive propaganda.

But of course, the supernatural or even surreal (though we should reject the term ‘Surrealist’) setup for the story also means that ‘The Metamorphosis’ is less a straightforward allegory (where X = Y) than it is a more rich and ambiguous exploration of the treatment of ‘the other’ (where X might = Y, Z, or even A, B, or C).

Gregor’s subsequent treatment at the hands of his family, his family’s lodgers, and their servants may well strike a chord with not just ethnic minorities living in some communities but also disabled people, people with different cultural or religious beliefs from ‘the mainstream’, struggling artists whose development is hindered by crass bourgeois capitalism and utilitarianism, and many other marginalised individuals.

This is one reason why ‘The Metamorphosis’ has become so widely discussed, analysed, and studied: its meaning is not straightforward, its fantastical scenario posing many questions.  What did Kafka mean by such a story? Is it a comedy, a tragedy, or both? Gregor’s social isolation from his nearest and dearest, and subsequent death (a death of despair, one suspects, as much as it is a noble sacrifice for the sake of his family), all suggest the story’s tragic undercurrents, and yet the way Kafka establishes Gregor’s transformation raises some intriguing questions.

Take that opening paragraph. The opening sentence – as with the very first sentence of Kafka’s novel, The Trial – is well-known, but what follows this arresting first statement is just as remarkable. For no sooner has Gregor discovered that he has been transformed, inexplicably, into a giant insect (or ‘vermin’), than his thoughts have turned from this incredible revelation to more day-to-day worries about his job and his travelling.

This is a trademark feature of Kafka’s writing, and one of the things the wide-ranging term ‘Kafkaesque’ should accommodate: the nightmarish and the everyday rubbing shoulders together. Indeed, the everyday already is a nightmare, and Samsa’s metamorphosis into an alien creature is just the latest in a long line of modernity’s hellish developments.

So the effect of this opening paragraph is to play down, as soon as it has been introduced, the shocking revelation that a man has been turned into a beetle (or similar creature).

Many subsequent details in Kafka’s story are similarly downplayed, or treated in a calm and ordinary way as if a man becoming a six-feet-tall insect is the most normal occurrence in the world, and this is part of the comedy of Kafka’s novella: an aspect of his work which many readers miss, partly because the comedic is so often the first thing lost in translation.

And, running contrariwise to the interpretation of ‘The Metamorphosis’ that sees it as ‘just’ a straightforward story about modern-day alienation and mistreatment of ‘the other’ is the plot itself, which sees Gregor Samsa freed from his life of servitude and duty, undertaking a job he doesn’t enjoy in order to support a family that, it turns out, are perfectly capable of supporting themselves (first by the father’s money which has been set aside, and then from the family’s jobs which the mother, father, and daughter all take, and discover they actually rather enjoy).

Even Gregor’s climbing of the walls and ceiling in his room, when he would have been travelling around doing his job, represents a liberation of sorts, even though he has physically become confined to one room. Perhaps, the grim humour of Kafka’s story appears to suggest, modernity is so hellish that such a transformation – even though it ends in death – is really the only liberation modern man can achieve.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Metamorphosis — The Metamorphosis: An Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Classic

The Metamorphosis: an Analysis of Franz Kafka's Classic

• Categories: Metamorphosis

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Words: 773 |

Published: Jan 29, 2024

Words: 773 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Analysis of the protagonist's transformation, exploration of familial relationships and societal expectations, examination of the role of work and the dehumanization of labor, interpretation of the existential themes in the text.

• Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Schocken Books, 2008.
• Fleishman, Avrom. "Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and Contemporary Criticism." The Kenyon Review, vol. 29, no. 4, 1967, pp. 491–514. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4334805.
• Duncan, Edward. "Kafka's Metamorphosis: Rebellion and Punishment." German Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 1, 1974, pp. 48–59. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/405433.

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Critical Analysis of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Introduction, critical analysis of metamorphosis, symbolism in the novel: summary, what aspect of kafka’s the metamorphosis can readers mostly relate to today, metamorphosis critical analysis conclusion, works cited.

The Metamorphosis is one of the main novels by a famous Austrian writer Franz Kafka. In addition, it is one of the most bright and impressive works of modern literature. The main subject of the novel is the family relations and problem of a person’s worthiness in the society. The main character of the story, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning and realizes that he transformed into a terrible bug.

This fantastic change of the main character is just an artistic mean which serves as a basis and background for other actions and other metamorphoses in his family and society that surrounds him.

Thus, the central motif of the story is the “metamorphosis” of a person and society. The Metamorphosis analysis essay shall examine the main topics of the short novel. The author explores and analyses such social problems as a person’s worthiness and the ills of society, making use of a mixture of fantasy and reality, allegories, and analysis of the psychology of the society. The Metamorphosis provides a deep insight into the human soul and family relations in the middle-class Australian family.

In the novel, the author emphasizes that society is hostile, and it does not need unproductive members. In order to show social-person relations, the author shows the relationships of the protagonist with his family. It is a typical and, at the same time, unique work of the modern period.

As has already been mentioned, the Metamorphosis is a work that contains all traits of modernist literature. It explores the ideas of individualism and contradiction of a person and society. The main subject of modernistic literature is the problems of modern life and the role of the individual who faces these problems.

What does The Metamorphosis have in common with many other works of literature? The works of modernistic literature are marked with pessimism and a response to the emerging city life and its society. The stream of consciousness is the leading literary convention used to transfer the absurdness of life and an individual’s attitude to the world.

Extensive use of comparisons, personifications, intertextuality, and psychoanalysis are the significant signs of modernism. The Metamorphosis, as a typical example of the modernistic literature, contains many symbols and metaphors, “Kafka often used a plainly described world of persecution in which one irrational element would be introduced to complete the narrative down an absurd path” (Childs 125).

This work can be challenging to analyze for the unprepared reader, and different readers can find different themes and meanings in this novel as there are plenty of them. However, the line, which every reader notices, is the line of changes that are discovered at different levels. The first change is a physical change of the protagonist “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” (Kafka 13).

The second change occurs with the mental state of the protagonist when he becomes aloof of the outer world, and “he was showing so little consideration for the others” (Kafka 22). Finally, the third line of changes appears within his family and its attitude to the protagonist. All these changes appear in real and fantastic context and, “Kafka’s ability to successfully join the fantastic and the real is often noted as being at the root of his genius” (Bloom 34).

The piece of writing has strict structure and develops in chronological order. The story opens with the scene when Gregor Samsa, a young man from a middle-class family, wakes up in the morning and discovers that he transformed into a terrible insect. The beginning of the story immediately provokes excitement and suspense. What is interesting is that Gregor does not feel worried about his transformation, but he is concerned about the fact that he will miss a train and will be late for a job. He had never missed even a day and, “in fifteen years of service Gregor had never once yet been ill.” (Kafka 16).

The fact of transformation is a strong literary convention that helps the author to explore the main subjects in his work.

After having transformed into a terrible insect, Gregor preserves his human soul, and he is still worried about his family, and he needs help and support of his family. But he receives them neither from his parents nor from his sister. The only thing that concerns them is that their single “source of income” will not be able to bring money. The only things that Gregor receives from his family are anger, fear, and even aggression.

Even the fact that this insect is their son and brother cannot excite their understanding and compassion. In his turn, Gregor understands his family members and makes everything possible not to bother them. Reading the novel, one realizes that behind the appearance of the bug, there is a king and tender soul of a young man.

Gregor tries to bring fewer concerns to his parents and family, he does not leave his room not to frighten his mother and hides under the bed when his sister cleans the room. A tense atmosphere in the family grows. All family members are starting to hate Gregor, and they behave as if he is not a human anymore.

The breaking point for the story comes when Grete, Gregor’s sister, declares that the insect in the room is not Gregor anymore and just a bug and they have to get rid of him:

“Things cannot go on any longer in this way. Maybe if you don’t understand that, well, I do. I will not utter my brother’s name in front of this monster, and thus I say only that we must try to get rid of it. We have tried what is humanly possible to take care of it and to be patient. I believe that no one can criticize us in the slightest.” (Kafka, 137).

The same night Gregor dies, and nobody misses him.

The problem of the individual and person’s worthiness appears though the text. When Gregor was still a human, he was discontent with his job but did it to pay the debts of his father. Thus, the author explores the conflict of society and human existence in it. Gregor’s transformation in the insect was a logical continuation of his involuntary dependence and his unhappy human life. The allusion to the insect is not accidental.

The bug is unprotected in front of society, as well as Gregor’s life was. After the transformation, the life in the family changed, “the house soon started to fall apart; the household was reduced more and more.” (Kafka 111). However, it was not for a long time.

Soon, a metamorphosis occurred to other members of the family as well. Gregor’s father “turned from a lethargic, failed businessman to a productive, active member of the work force” (Bloom, 44). The family does not need Gregor anymore.

They have got money, and it is the only thing they wanted from Gregor. It may seem that family’s attitude to Gregor changed after his metamorphosis. However, it is evident that this change only discovered the truth. Thus, Gregor was only a “machine” that brought money. It was his primary role in the family.

His family treats him as a working “bug.” However, not only his family but also the society where he lived as well treat him this way. He discovers that he was not worthy of anything, and even if he dies, nobody will notice it.

Gregor lived as a bug, and he transformed into a bug. But, the readers are not horrified with the transformation, but with the terrible attitude to a poor young man. Even the view of the reader suffers changes. We feel compassion towards Gregor, and his family’s behavior fills us with indignation. A terrible everyday life and attitude of parents to their son seem to be unacceptable. However, it is a terrible reality that depicts a real social structure.

In the character of Gregor Samsa, the author focused not only on the individual problem of one young man but the problem of the whole society. This novel is the brightest expression of the tragic perception of the world that was a characteristic feature of all Kafka’s works.

The situation of transformation can be interpreted in different ways. It may concern a family and social alienation, the loneliness of a person capable of compassion and self-sacrifice, one’s difference from others. Kafka depicts the protagonist’s mental and spiritual isolation as a result of his metamorphosis.

The author shows the essence of society realistic and believable: you are a member of the community while you can perform your job and serve it. However, if you are not capable of doing it, society does not need you anymore and can even get read of you.

Gregor is an unproductive individual, and his family is a symbol of the society which does not want to accept the one who does not bring any profit. In this novel. Kafka emphasizes the fact of human vulnerability in society. A person is just a powerless and helpless “toy” doomed to be lonely, even among the closest people, his/her family.

The Metamorphosis is an innovative work in the world of prose. It is full of symbolic and metaphorical images that emphasize the tragedy of a person’s fate, the alienation of the personality, its helplessness in front of society. The novel depicts the hostile world. It is one of the stories that make people think about “questions of life.”

It makes it one of the best modernistic works of literature and the most examined and criticized novels. As The Metamorphosis analysis essay evidences, different people can find different themes in this book. However, the dominant theme is the alienation of the person and its relations with society. Through the description of family relations in the Gregor’s family, the author makes allusions to the relationships in modern society.

The author provides the idea that society is cruel, and it does not need unproductive people. This idea is closely interrelated with the social problem of a person’s worthiness in the world. The author expresses his vision of the person’s role in society, making use of the fantastic transformation of the protagonist in the bug.

Bloom, Harold. Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006.

Childs, Peter. Modernism. New York, Routledge, 2008.

Kafka, Franz. Metamorphosis. Delaware: Prestwick House Inc, 2005.

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"Critical Analysis of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka." IvyPanda , 17 May 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-social-problem-of-a-persons-worthiness-in-the-book-by-franz-kafka-the-metamorphosis/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'Critical Analysis of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka'. 17 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "Critical Analysis of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka." May 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-social-problem-of-a-persons-worthiness-in-the-book-by-franz-kafka-the-metamorphosis/.

1. IvyPanda . "Critical Analysis of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka." May 17, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-social-problem-of-a-persons-worthiness-in-the-book-by-franz-kafka-the-metamorphosis/.

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Some functions, such as personalized recommendations, account preferences, or localization, may not work correctly without these technologies. For more details, please refer to IvyPanda's Cookies Policy .

To enable personalized advertising (such as interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. These partners may have their own information collected about you. Turning off the personalized advertising setting won't stop you from seeing IvyPanda ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive.

Personalized advertising may be considered a "sale" or "sharing" of the information under California and other state privacy laws, and you may have the right to opt out. Turning off personalized advertising allows you to exercise your right to opt out. Learn more in IvyPanda's Cookies Policy and Privacy Policy .