The metamorphosis By Franz Kafka

The metamorphosis By Franz Kafka

                               …Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?

The metamorphosis is a surreal story of transformation. And, even more so, it is a story of the unchanged in the context of transformation. Through the unvocal, insignificantly fading-in world that he has created by his economically worded lines, Kafka highlights how albeit the character remains constant the personage itself changes when external world does not identify the character. It seems in the story that the acknowledgement of existence of a person by the external world is more significant than the existence of person itself.

It would appear, if one interprets the transformation as purely figurative, that Gregor, the protagonist of the story, transforms one day because he realizes that he is stranded in a meaningless, dreadful existence. He is a travelling salesman who goes to work, where he is presumably not treated well, to pay off his family’s debts and comes home to, if not an ungrateful, a nonchalant family. It seems that through this transformation he has not become something else but merely aware of what he already is. And this awareness coerces him to exist as someone who is aware of themselves as a weary, dreadful creature.

Perhaps the family can no longer find the Gregor who was unaware of his life, and whom they identified as Gregor ; perhaps Gregor's body transformed into something that he already was.

Kafka’s character development and story building are commendable. I couldn't stop reading the story once I started reading it. The language was flowing uninterruptedly from line to line in the translation by David Wyllie.

This work is a must read for readers who have enjoyed works of famous existentialists such as Sartre, Camus and Dostoevsky. General readers are likely to enjoy it too if they ruminate after reading it.