The Metamorphosis - Essay Example

The insect body stops him from moving or doing things, from getting out of bed without effort, opening doors, or responding logically to people around him. Gregor does not have the mental power over his new self. He discovers he has “numerous little legs, which were in every different kind of perpetual motion and which, besides, he could not control” (Kafka 7). His new self also starts showing a different character from his old one, weakening the strength of the original self of Gregor. A signal of this transformation takes place in the beginning when Gregor goes into the family room and suddenly begins putting his mouth at drops of coffee from a jar.

The nervous response to the hissing of his father is also an instance of insect response. In the following part, more signs of insect behavior appear. He senses a better feeling of comfort when his new body is given the freedom to act in its normal way. He also finds out the helpfulness of his antennae, a capacity to crawl and hang himself. Even the food he wants to eat also changes. He begins to dislike fresh foods and milk, and wants instead rotten ones. He becomes detached to the outside world.

His emotions change, usually in ways that even he cannot understand. He is fearful of the things which before would not bother him. However, such changes occur outside the consciousness of Gregor. He either does not recognize the cause of the changes in his behavior and tendencies, or he is simply weakly conscious of the new impulse. In the story, he drags himself to the bedroom door: “Only after he got to the door did he notice what had really attracted him—the smell of something to eat” (Kafka 21).

As time passes by, Gregor becomes more and more an animal than a self-conscious person. This attack on his identity by a new stimulating force indicates the slow taking over of his previous self. With the slow replacement of one identity of another, the self-conscious self loses its control, and a new one seizes power. The uniqueness of Gregor starts to come into the surface. His consciousness conflicts with his new insect-like self. This conflict between Gregor’s consciousness and insect-like self can be analyzed in this way.

Primarily, the insect-like character does not develop from the past human self of Gregor. Yet, Gregor’s awareness is obviously associated with his human past. Then, human identity and insect-like identity are unconnected—no connected self combines both human and insect behaviors. Besides several recognitions of their presence, the new insect-like behavior and personality stay outside his awareness. Even though sometimes Gregor thinks about their existence, he does not knowingly recognize them as his own.

Hence, rather than a fused identity, the changed Gregor is divided into two selves, conflicting but equally occurring in the same body. Due to this unsettled theoretical conflict, Kafka does not give a solution to the issue of whether the insect-like identity is physiologically whole or mixed. This physiological confusion is shown in many human-like depictions of the changed Gregor, such as “his eyes streaming with tears of contentment” (Kafka 24). This creates uncertainty over the precise character of the biological changes in Gregor.

However, this conflict between the insect-like and human Gregor has been, in the first place, caused by his working conditions. That the