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.