The Metamorphosis — Commentary

In brief

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his sister, wakes one morning to find he has become a huge insect. The chief clerk comes to the flat to ask why he has missed his train, hears an animal voice behind the door, sees him and runs. Part II covers the weeks of his confinement. His sister Grete feeds him and cleans the room, and the family learn to work. When Gregor frightens his mother, his father bombs him with apples, and one lodges in his back. In Part III the room becomes a dumping ground, the family takes in three lodgers, and Grete plays her violin. Gregor crawls out to listen, is seen, and the lodgers give notice. Grete declares that the thing must go. Gregor dies that night. The family take a day off and ride a tram into the country, feeling that the future is not so bad.

The argument

Readers tend to treat this as a story about an insect. Its subject is what a family does when the person who has been keeping it stops being useful. The transformation, famously, is never explained or even much wondered at. What Kafka works out, in detail and with something like comic patience, are the consequences: who now pays, who cleans, who opens the door. Within a few paragraphs of waking, Gregor’s main worry is the train he has missed.

The story’s hardest fact is financial and comes in Part II. Listening at the door, Gregor learns that his father kept back money from the collapse of the family business and put by some of what Gregor brought home. That money could have reduced the debt which holds Gregor in a job he hates, and brought his release much closer. He is pleased. He nods behind the door at this “unexpected thrift and caution” (Part II). The joke is cruel, and it shows what he was before he woke up: a man grateful to be used. The insect is a late stage in a process that started with the debt.

And the family flourish. The father had been a tired man in a dressing gown; once Gregor stops earning, he is suddenly upright in a bank uniform with gold buttons. The real Verwandlung of the title is arguably not the one on the first page. Bernofsky points out in her translator’s afterword that the German word, unlike the English, suggests no natural change of state, which is one more reason to look past the animal for what has been altered.

Ungeziefer and the opening sentence

Kafka’s opening is “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt” (Part I). No English translator has been happy with its last words. Ungeziefer, on the usual etymology, goes back to a Middle High German term for an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, and in ordinary use it means vermin or pests, a collective and contemptuous word for what you get rid of. It can cover mice as well as bugs. Ungeheuer is monstrous or huge, and Mark Harman notes that it is the opposite of geheuer, familiar. Together the two words make the double “un” that Harman says defies translation.

At least sixteen English versions of the phrase have been counted. The Muirs in 1933, the first translators, wrote “gigantic insect”, and for decades that was simply what the story said. A. L. Lloyd in 1937 tried “some monstrous kind of vermin”. Stanley Corngold in 1972 chose “monstrous vermin”, the most faithful of them. Michael Hofmann in 2007 boldly wrote “monstrous cockroach”, and Susan Bernofsky in 2014 “some sort of monstrous insect”, adding the first three words, she explains, to blur the outline. David Wyllie, in the free text linked here, has “horrible vermin”. That keeps the contempt of the noun and loses the strangeness of the adjective.

The problem cannot be solved, but one thing helps. In the whole German text the word Ungeziefer appears just once, in that sentence, and the narrator never uses it again. After it the family and strangers find their own words. The chief clerk hears a “Tierstimme” (Part I), an animal’s voice. The charwoman calls Gregor “old dung-beetle” (Part III), out of something like friendliness. Grete says “Untier”, monster. Vladimir Nabokov, a lepidopterist, went further and drew the creature in his teaching copy: a beetle, he decided, with wings under the shell that Gregor never finds out about. It is fine reading, and I think beside the point, since Kafka wanted the species left open. Kafka had the word in his own life too. He used Ungeziefer again in the Letter to His Father of 1919, which was never delivered.

The insect on the cover

The story appeared in the journal Die weißen Blätter in October 1915 and as a book in Kurt Wolff’s series Der jüngste Tag that December. When Kafka learned that Ottomar Starke was to draw the cover, he wrote to the publisher on 25 October 1915. In one common English version: “The insect itself is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance.” The instruction was followed. Starke’s drawing shows a man with his hands to his face, turning from an open door on to a dark room.

This is the best evidence we have of how Kafka wanted the story read, and it comes from the author in a practical mood. The creature was to remain words. In the same spirit, the text gives details, such as the back “armour-like” and the legs thin, and they do not assemble into anything. Many later covers show a bug anyway, and each one answers a question that the story is at pains not to raise.

Grete

Grete is the one person whose change the story follows closely, and it is the main reason for reading it twice. She is seventeen. In Part I she is the one who whispers through the door. In Part II she is the only one who enters his room. She works out what he will eat by putting down a selection on old newspaper, and she takes pride in being the only person who understands him. It is a form of love, and it is also a first experience of power. By degrees she stops being careful, and when she and her mother clear his furniture, she does it partly to have a larger field of her own. Gregor, climbing on to the picture of the lady in furs to save something of his own, is facing his sister when she shouts at him for the first time.

Gregor’s secret plan had been to pay for her to study the violin at the conservatory. Near the end of Part III she plays for the lodgers, who soon get bored, while Gregor, who hears it as beautiful, crawls out to listen. “Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?” (Part III) is the story’s one great question, in German “War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff?” Readers split over the answer: either the music proves the man is still there, or it belongs to the animal, and he had not cared for music as a man. He imagines keeping her in his room and kissing her bare neck, and it is one of the story’s most disturbing touches that this fantasy is given with such tenderness.

Then she pronounces sentence. It is she, and not the father, who says “I don’t want to call this monster my brother” (Part III), and German is stronger: “Ich will vor diesem Untier nicht den Namen meines Bruders aussprechen”, I will not speak my brother’s name in front of this monster. She moves from “we have to try and get rid of it” to “How can that be Gregor?”, a piece of reasoning that would have been unbearable from anyone who had not fed him. Gregor agrees with her. Kafka says he remembers his family “mit Rührung und Liebe” (Part III), with emotion and love, and dies around dawn.

The last sentence belongs to her. On the tram the parents notice together that their daughter has grown into a fine young woman, that it will soon be time to find her a husband, and at the end of the ride she is the first to get up and “stretch out her young body” (Part III). Many readers have found the ending a let-down. I find it hard to think of anything more frightening than this health. The sun is out, she has been through her own metamorphosis, and she is ready to be handed on to a husband.

The people

Gregor

Gregor Samsa is the most considerate monster in literature. He worries about his boss, hides under the couch so as not to upset his sister, and agrees with the sentence against him. His decency and his servility cannot be pulled apart, and this is the source of the comedy.

The father and the mother

Mr Samsa drives him back through the door in Part I, and the apple he throws in Part II rots in Gregor’s back through the whole of Part III. Mrs Samsa keeps wanting to go in, and is restrained; she faints on seeing him in Part II and pleads for his life at the climax of the apple scene. It is not enough.

The lodgers and the charwoman

The three bearded lodgers give the family a parody of authority. The old charwoman, the only one not frightened of him, is the one who pokes him with a broom, reports him dead, and clears him away.

Readers and critics

Kafka wrote the story in late 1912, while writing daily to Felice Bauer, and came to speak of it as “exceptionally repulsive”. Nabokov’s lecture, published in Lectures on Literature (1980), is the best-known reading in English, and it insists that the family are the real parasites. Critics have since gone at it from Freud, Marx and Judaism, and from the family’s bookkeeping, and none of them has managed to close it. I think that is because the story keeps its fantastic element as dry as a business letter.

Afterlives

Steven Berkoff directed a physical stage version, with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Gregor in 1989, in which the insect is done with the actor’s body alone. Arthur Pita made a dance-theatre version for Edward Watson at the Royal Opera House in 2011, and Watson won an Olivier Award for it. Philip Roth’s The Breast (1972) turns a professor into a mammary gland and has him read Kafka.

How to read it

Read it in English, free, with care about the terms. Project Gutenberg’s eBook #5200, David Wyllie’s translation, is free to read. It is not in the public domain. Gutenberg marks it as copyrighted and says it is included with the permission of the copyright holder, and its copy prints no further terms, so anyone republishing it should check first. Kafka’s German is in the public domain.
Know what you cannot get free. The better modern versions are all in copyright and must be bought. Quotations from Wyllie on this page are kept short for that reason. The Muirs’ 1933 version is not yet free in the United States: Standard Ebooks says it enters the public domain there on 1 January 2029.
Buy one better translation. Wyllie’s is serviceable, plain and very British, with its flat and its charwoman, but it flattens the first sentence and his phrasing often runs to the colloquial. Corngold’s (1972) keeps closest to the key phrase. Hofmann’s (Penguin, 2007) takes the biggest risks. Bernofsky’s (Norton, 2014) has an afterword on the translator’s choices.
Do not picture him too clearly. Kafka did not.
Stay for the last page. The story does not end when Gregor dies, and the tram ride is the point.

Franz Kafka, “The Judgment” (1913). Written shortly before this, another son sentenced by his family, in one night.
Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose” (1836). The same deadpan about the impossible, with the laughter left on.
Philip Roth, The Breast (1972). The American reply, knowing all about it.
Ovid, Metamorphoses (about 8 AD). Where transformation always meant something, for comparison with a story where it refuses to.