Gregor’s Family as Subconscious

Manami Mizumoto

Franz Kafka’s novella, The Metamorphosis, tracks the fate of Gregor Samsa, who begins the story by transforming into a large insect. However, his response to the unexplained transformation is limited and one-dimensional at best and verges on ridiculous. Similarly, his family’s responses take on simplified archetypal roles, and any human complexity that normally might be given to main characters in a story are never developed or shown. This can be explained by understanding the family as an extension of Gregor’s own subconscious as he deals with his transformational trauma. Gregor’s mother expresses the fear and repulsion of his new form, his father takes the role of enforcing Gregor’s imprisonment with physical threats, and his sister Grete acts as the keeper who eventually takes over Gregor’s being. These responses serve to show the entirety of Gregor’s means of coping, while retaining the severe denial and emotional non-response that is so important to Gregor’s character.

Throughout the novel, Gregor refuses to truly acknowledge his physical metamorphosis into an insect, except to take account of what his obligatory actions might be. During his first morning as an insect, when the general manager comes to inquire and Gregor’s form has been revealed, Gregor’s response is shockingly incongruous to his physical state. “’Well,’ Gregor said, quite conscious of the fact that he was the only one who had retained his composure, ‘I shall get dressed at once, pack up my samples and be on my way’” (Kafka 14). For a body that could not open the lock without significant struggle, or even get out of bed, the idea that he could dress himself in human clothes and pack his samples is comical. The possibility of a large insect in human clothes invokes a grotesque image, as well. The repulsiveness stems from the concept of an animal pretending to be human or carrying out human actions. This grotesque extreme is also present in his character. His denial and emotional non-response is so central that his character seems one-dimensional and shallow, overtaken by his apparent refusal of understanding. In order to preserve this grotesqueness, yet develop his character through this journey, Kafka then provides the reader with the other portions of his psyche, in the form of his family. Gregor’s mother represents his paralyzing fear of the grotesque form he has taken. Her main role is to be the hyper-emotional contrast to Gregor’s non-emotion, and she serves only to respond to the fearful nature of Gregor’s form through her emotional, exaggerated outbursts of fainting or crying.

She saw the huge brown blotch on the flowered wallpaper, and before she was even able to realize that what she saw there was Gregor, she cried out in a hoarse, shrieking voice, ‘Oh God, oh God!’ and fell back upon the settee, her arms spread wide as though she were giving up everything, and lay there without moving (Kafka 29).

Kafka ensures that her response is completely removed from rational thought by indicating that her response, fainting, comes before she understands that the “brown blotch” is Gregor. The description of her voice is guttural, animalistic, and suggests primal fear. In addition, her pose “as though she were giving up everything” makes clear that she instinctively feels threatened or attacked by Gregor’s grotesqueness and is giving up in a sort of appeasement to higher powers. These emotion and instinct-driven responses characterize Gregor’s mother as she appears briefly throughout the story and serve as the personification of his repressed emotional response.

On the other hand, Gregor’s father represents his drive to remain imprisoned in his room, detached from the outside world. His father is also the only character to threaten and punish with physical force. “Even so: was this still his father? The same man who used to lie wearily entombed in his bed…Now he was standing properly erect; dressed in a smart blue uniform with gold buttons…then advanced grim-faced upon Gregor…And so he fled from his father” (Kafka 30-31). As Gregor weakens, his father becomes more virile, militaristic, and more punitive. Whereas before, Kafka used words associated with death and decay to describe his father, now he is described as powerful and punitive. This threat of punishment is only directed at Gregor when he is outside the confines of his room, when he opens any door, or when he escapes into another room. Therefore, the character of Gregor’s father serves only to ensure his imprisonment and secrecy, maintaining Gregor’s withdrawal from the rest of humanity. Ultimately, this is another part of Gregor’s transformation, where it is not just his salesman character that metamorphoses into a helpless insect, but also his self-punishing side that is strengthened in order to hasten the insect’s death.

Comparatively, Gregor’s sister Grete becomes the most complex and developed character in the story. She starts out as a sympathizer and caretaker, offering him sustenance and cleaning his room. However, in fully establishing her caretaker role, she gains perceived value within the family. “And often he heard them expressing their heartfelt appreciation of his sister’s labors, whereas earlier they had often been annoyed with her, since she had seemed to them a rather useless girl” (Kafka 25). In this narrative, labor is the only act that gives value to a person, which is the reason Gregor, drained and unable to work, is a sub-human insect. By performing some act of labor, Grete creates a preliminary value for her personhood.

Next, to fully capitalize on this, Grete soon becomes his owner, the only person allowed to make decisions concerning Gregor. This realization of human value through labor is also represented in her act of becoming a salesgirl. “His sister, who had taken a job as a salesgirl, was studying stenography and French in the evenings so as possibly to move to a better position later on” (Kafka 33). By taking over a job akin to Gregor’s salesman position, and taking promotion as her primary focus, she is establishing herself as a player in the world of capitalistic values.

Finally, to complete her ownership of Gregor, she usurps him by dealing the final blow that leads to his death. “No sooner was he in his room again than the door was hastily pressed shut, locked and bolted. The sudden commotion at his back gave him such a frightful start that his little legs gave way beneath him. It was his sister who had hurried thus” (Kafka 43). Though she does not physically hurt him, her dismissal of his humanity is in fact much more damaging to Gregor than his father’s assaults. This is because her ownership of him grants her full control over his life and death, and she is the sole connection to humanity he has left. When she stops seeing him as a once-human “Gregor”, he dies by himself without a violent execution because he is already effectively dead to the world. In doing so, Grete fully takes his place as the sales-person, the laborer. Thus, Kafka writes Grete as the most developed character because she eventually takes over Gregor’s narrative.

Through these three characters, we can understand the ways in which Gregor’s psyche deals with this transformation. Though Gregor, the insect, is written as a one-dimensional caricature of denial, his mother expresses his repressed emotion; his father embodies the punitive shame that keeps him imprisoned; and Grete is the caretaker and link to humanity. The true tragedy of Metamorphosis is that in this transformation, Grete fails as a humanizing caretaker and takes Gregor’s place as a laborer. In doing so, she restarts the cycle of selling. Gregor’s body was sold to the work he did as a salesman, presumably to pay off debt and gain wealth. Similarly, Grete becomes a salesgirl and, as indicated in her parents’ comments on her body, will ultimately be sold as a wife in order to gain social standing and a rich husband.

Works Cited

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. Susan Bernofsky. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 2016.