Gregor Samsa and his Embodiment of Modernism Themes

📌Category: Philosophy
📌Words: 864
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 20 June 2021

Introduction

The Metamorphosis is a short story written by Franz Kafka in 1915. He was born in Austria - Hungary, the modern-day Czech Republic. Kafka had an interesting upbringing where he was an outcast most of the time, he dealt with abuse from his father and lived most of his life in a depressive state. The Metamorphosis contains the tale of a man named Gregor Samsa and his metamorphosis from man to a bug, including all of the issues and adjustments he had to deal with after the change. The book contains many parallels between the life of Franz Kafka and Gregor Samsa. The novella tackles many ideas such as alienation, modernism, and existentialism, which are all common themes for writers during the romantic period. The tale takes issues from society at the time and issues throughout Kafka's life and infuses them into the story.

The Metamorphosis Modernism Theme Analysis

In The Metamorphosis Samsa wakes up one morning and finds he’s in the body of a bug, after quickly realizing he cannot do normal tasks, he misses work, which irritates his family as they rely on him for income. When he wakes up again his sister has given him food and he realizes that the rest of his family and boss no longer like him because of his changes and inability to work. Because of the hate and isolation from those around him, Gregor dies at the end of the story, his family is grateful that he is no longer there. The modernism theme of alienation is shown in The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka by showing a lack of sympathy, neglect, and feelings of shame around Gregor Samsa after his transformation.

Gregor’s family neglects him after his transformation and he is limited to his room, leading to Gregor falling into a depression and the doorway between him and the rest of his house becoming a symbol of freedom and alienation from the world. In the story, Gregor refers to his room as “his imprisonment” and becomes stuck in his room since he can no longer go to work, his family does not want to interact with him, and he is ashamed of what he has become (Kafka 22). Not only does he keep himself in his room because he is ashamed of his new appearance but the doorway becomes a symbol of his family’s distaste for him, their “absence of direct contact reduces him to eavesdropping through locked doors” (Moss 39). The doorway is Gregor’s connection to the rest of the world after his transition, between his own issues mental health, and depression combines with the hate and abuse he receives from his family, the entrance to Gregor’s room soon becomes a point of negativity in the novel and shows his connection to freedom, or lack the overall lack of freedom he has after his change. This depression and alienation that Gregor experiences throughout the story could be related to what Kafka, the author, experienced during his own struggle with depression and abuse with his father. By infusing aspects of Kafka’s own life into the story, while making it original to Gregor’s conditions, allows for the ideas, based on Franz Kafka modernism themes, to have a strong impact on the reader because the descriptions of what Gregor was going through have emotional fuel behind them, therefore portraying the modernism theme of alienation very well.

Factors of Gregor’s Alienation

One of the biggest factors of Gregor’s alienation from the normal world is his overall isolation from the rest of the population, with his lack of communication and other barriers this separation is very difficult for him. At the beginning of the story, Gregor is still completing his metamorphosis and he is still able to communicate with those around him by talking, specifically his family and the chief, but slowly he begins to lose control over his voice and it spirals into bug noises, ending up with him losing “all possibility of communication and [he] is thrown forever into his terrifying isolation” due to language barriers and fear of the unknown by those around him (Sokel 210).  Because those around him cannot communicate with him once he loses his ability to speak like a human he is fully alienated from society, including his sister who originally still took care of him. This alienation from society, work, and family leads to a questioning of self-worth inside of Gregor. Gregor, who never had a fantastic relationship with his family ends up “ filled with rage at their miserable treatment of him” (Kafka 40). His family treatment of him once he loses his ability to communicate as well as provide funding for the family embodies the idea of alienation because these changes affected how Samsa was treated socially lead to his isolation.

Сonclusion

Overall modernist authors, including Kafka in The Metamorphosis, emphasize a theme of alienation in their works. Alienation is the separation of a person from an object or group of people and ideas. In this novel in particular Kafka shows alienation by placing an emphasis on the neglectful treatment of Gregor Samsa by his family. As well as by detailing the complete isolation from the normal outside world that he experienced after his transformation from human to bug. Kafka takes experiences such as his own depression and mistreatment by his father during his upbringing and infuses them into the story to support popular modernism themes and ideas throughout the novel. Overall Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is an excellent example of a modernist text with its use of the theme of alienation throughout the tale of Gregor Samsa’s transformation.

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