Franz Kalfa's Metamorphosis - Essay Example

Although the family continues to care for him, providing him with food and water and cleaning his room once a day, Gregor becomes more and more detached from them, eventually finding it difficult to keep track of what has been happening around him. His room becomes dirtier, his family becomes less attentive and he becomes less concerned with their welfare in connection with his own. As his sister and mother move his personal furniture out of his room, he leaves the room with a mind toward helping his sister, but is instead attacked by his father, becoming wounded in the process when an apple thrown at him becomes lodged in his back.

Rather than tending to his wounds, the family locks him back in his room again where the apple is able to fester for months. The room becomes the general receptacle of household debris before Gregor’s final attempt to reconnect with his family results in such harsh and complete rejection that he simply crawls back in his room and dies. Through the story, Kafka uses the concept of work to highlight some of the problems of the human condition. It can be argued that Gregor’s transformation is a literal indication of his feelings of separation from humanity, including from the members of his own family, as can be seen in from the very beginning of the story.

Despite waking up to find himself in the form of a bug, Gregor’s primary concern remains to get to work in order to continue supporting the family who has been dependent upon him for the past five years. As he reflects upon his position, he reveals the level of disconnectedness that has already occurred between himself and his family, indeed the rest of humanity, since he took a job as a traveling salesman: “And apart from business itself, this plague of traveling: the anxieties of changing trains, the irregular, inferior meals, the ever changing faces, never to be seen again, people with whom one has no chance to be friendly” (13).

Even in his own home, he