Gregor's Disappearing Humanity

I like Kafka. I think he is the most interesting and humorous writer that we have read so far, even though his books are laden with dark themes. I like the strange surrealist nature of the book; the very first line brings you into a world where nothing is completely logical by our standards. The way that Kafka puts his sentences together is both humorous and surreal--he just gives you facts, and some of Gregor's thoughts, but the facts and thoughts are so bizarre that the sentences become humorous even though they aren't really. "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." There it is. It is a fact, and no one seems very interested in questioning it. So this makes it fun to read, but there are also deeper elements of the book that make it more thoughtful. One of the most interesting to me is Gregor's humanity.

Gregor's humanity is called into question from the very first page of the book, when he turns into a giant bug. This is a pretty big deal, but Gregor is still undeniably human. He has human thoughts an human worries about his family, his job, and how he can get out of bed. It does seem a bit weird that he doesn't worry more about becoming a giant bug, because most humans would be pretty disturbed, but he still just seems to have a little problem. It reminds me of the quote from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when Lupin says that "[James] called it my little furry problem" when speaking about his transformations into a werewolf. At the very beginning of the book, I feel like Gregor just has a "little furry problem", and under that he is still fully human.

Slowly, his situation becomes a little murkier. We can see that Gregor, even as a human, had some very insect-like qualities. He is focused on his job to the extreme, and is willing to work long hours for the benefit of his company and his family. He doesn't seem to have is own goals and desires, and is submissive to all those around him. He is also very isolated from human emotion; he is not isolated from human contact at all, since he is a traveling salesman, but even though he spends much of his time talking to strangers on his job, he spends his free time at his house reading a paper or studying train timetables. There is little evidence of family discussions during those times, and none of his family seem to really understand his except his sister. He also keeps his door locked when he sleeps, which seems an odd thing to do when staying in your own home with your own family. This isolation will increase once he turns into a bug, but it was already there before. These qualities are not inhuman, but they are not really normal either.

Additionally, Gregor stops being able to speak like a human over time--he is degenerating more a more into a bug. At first his family doesn't notice that there is anything wrong, but by the end of the first part no one can understand him anymore. This puts the reader in an interesting position; for us, Gregor's thoughts are perfectly understandable, but Gregor's family cannot tell that it is really him. So we see Gregor sympathetically, and it is more difficult to understand why his family is reacting by beating him back into his room.

Which brings up another interesting question. Does Gregor's family know that the bug is Gregor, or do they think that it is not Gregor and that it may very well have killed or eaten Gregor? It doesn't seem that they think he is Gregor; either they think that he is so far gone after his transformation that he no longer has any of Gregor's thoughts or feelings, or they think that the bug was never Gregor at all, because it would be difficult to beat your own child and treat him like an animal if you thought he could still be cured.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out later in the book. It seems like in every sentence, there is something that makes Gregor less and less human (for example, he finds it easier not to walk upright anymore), but what would Kafka be saying about life if he let Gregor degenerate into an insect psychologically? I don't think that theme would be a very positive one.

To Hell with Brett

I haven't posted anything about Hemingway in general yet, but I'm just going to dive into Brett. Oh, she is so confusing, pitiful, powerful, arrogant, immoral, annoying, funny, and most of all contradictory. I have a feeling that she is much more attractive to men than she is to women; it seems like most of the boys in class found her to be sympathetic, while the girls found her obnoxious. There is much more to her than meets the eye, as is typical with Hemingway's writing, but of course it is never revealed and so we never really understand her. I decided to flip through some webpages on her to see what I could find. So these aren't really cohesive arguments. They're just observations that helped me to understand her a little better.

• Brett Ashley was not modeled on Hemingway's current wife, Hadley Richardson. Instead, she was based on Lady Duff Twysden and Pauline Pfeiffer, who Hemingway would later go on to marry after divorcing Hadley. This creates a curious parallel between Brett and Hemingway himself. In The Sun Also Rises, Brett had already been married twice and was going to marry Mike as her third husband. She was also extremely unfaithful, going off with many different men. Hemingway married four women within a twenty-five year span, and was infatuated with others. Both characters fell in love easily, then fell in love again and felt bad that they had left whomever they loved first. Brett felt guilty about her many "conquests", and Hemingway said about Hadley, "I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her." An odd parallel for a man who cared so much about masculinity.
• The independence-loneliness paradox: Brett is extremely independent for her time. In the twenties, women were beginning to have more opportunities, but Brett takes this to the extreme. Of course, she doesn't work, so she is dependent on either her parents, an inherited fortune, or her husband, but she lives away from her husband, travels Europe, and seems to keep everyone under her control. Nevertheless, she is not happy being alone--she is almost afraid of loneliness. Her relationships with numerous men do not give her any lasting satisfaction or happiness. Jake says that she "cannot go anywhere alone." Her lifestyle is the epitome of the wandering lifestyle of the expatriates. She wanders from man to man as Jake and his friends wander from bar to bar and country to country.
• Brett is dangerous to men. She makes men wild about her, and does it even without trying. This poses a threat to the men of the story. They do not necessarily want to fall in love with her; Cohn calls her Circe, while Jake has many moments of feeling like it would be much easier for him if he was not in love with her. He says things like "To hell with Brett. To hell with you, Lady Ashley." Brett is also liberated and semi-androgynous, with masculine manners and vocabulary (chap) and a boyish haircut. It is interesting that Hemingway should combine these two aspects. Hemingway's presentation of Brett has led critics to describe her as a "bitch-goddess", a "woman who made castration her hobby", and a nymphomaniac. Clearly, his presentation of her is not particularly positive, and it is possible to conclude that Hemingway was an anti-feminist who saw danger in women gaining liberation. However, there are hints in the book that it is not quite this simple.

There are many more things to be said and understood about Brett, but that is as far as I am going to go right now. Brett and her relationships with Jake, Mike, Cohn, and Romero are so complicated that I'm sure you could write a book about her. Overall, I would say that though I don't personally like Brett, she adds a lot to the book and reveals interesting things about what Hemingway may have thought about the role of women in the twenties.