On Monsters and Humans: The Metamorphosis

Have you ever wondered what type of bug Gregor is? After all, it wasn’t explicitly stated in the novel. Many speculate that he is a huge cockroach. Others suspect that he is in fact a large beetle. Professional entomologist Nabokov Vladimir, a man enamored with Kafka’s story, has even done a detailed analysis about the text and has concluded that Gregor is most likely a beetle (You can check out his lecture here). The important thing to realize is that somehow Gregor Samsa had transformed, as stated in the very first sentence of the entire novel: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect” (Kafka 1). We don’t know why and we don’t know how, but right away we discover that Gregor Samsa is a huge insect in appearance. Mentally, however, we see his human conscience remains as his first concern was that he was late for his work. His grotesque appearance too disturbing for them to handle, Gregor’s family isolate and hide him away. They assume that he cannot understand them and carry on treating him like a monster, even afraid to be in his presence for longer than a few minutes. Gregor has, in fact, somewhat become the Incredible Hulk.
 
 
What an absurd statement! But let me explain. 
For those of you who don’t know about the Hulk, I'll summarize based on the two Marvel movies he was featured in: The Incredible Hulk and The Avengers. The Hulk is actually Bruce Banner, a modest human physicist who was experimenting with gamma radiation. After an incident exposing him to the very same radiation, Banner now transforms  involuntarily into ”an enormous green rage monster”, as Tony Stark puts it. As this Hulk, Banner has no control over his temper and incredible strength. He basically likes to smash things, causing fear and panic everywhere he goes. For this he is often perceived as a threatening monster because of his looks and deranged behavior, and he moves to Calcutta to isolate himself.

"It's not easy being green."

That’s basically Gregor. It’s a struggle for both "monsters" to hold onto humanity as they deal with the change in their lives.  Like when Bruce Banner loses his human conscious when becoming the Hulk, Gregor also begins to lose sight of his humanity, becoming more and more like a bug the longer he remains one. He doesn't lose sight of it completely, however. Back to Nabokov Vladmir’s thoughts on The Metamorphosis and Gregor’s beginning transformation, he writes, “In the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He his half-awake—he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet.” It's true; the metamorphosis isn't complete because both men retain their humanity despite their appearances. Banner isn’t the Hulk forever; it is his subconscious that restrains the Hulk’s full power, and he is capable of changing back into a human. Although Gregor doesn’t have that same luxury of turning human again, he desperately clings onto his humanity, represented physically in the text by the picture of the woman with the furs. He is a human on the inside who is solely concerned about the fate of his family, and he remains a human until his bitter death.

"On hearing those words from his mother Gregor realized that the lack of all direct human speech for the past two months together with the monotony of family life must have confused his mind, otherwise he could not account for the fact that he had quite earnestly looked forward to having his room emptied of furnishing. Did he really want his warm room, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be turned into a naked den in which he would certainly be able to crawl unhampered in all directions but at the price of shedding simultaneously all recollection of his human background?" –Kafka, The Metamorphosis. Here we see Gregor come to terms with the fact that he still wants to be and is still human.
 
Back to the first question: Why don’t we find out what type of bug Gregor is? It is because it’s not important to know what type of bug he is on the outside but rather what type of human he is on the inside. Gregor Samsa is the Hulk, a raging, terrifying monster who seems focused on destruction, but inside there is a human Bruce Banner that controls the "monster" that he supposedly is. It is not the outward appearance that proves a person is human but rather the human qualities that they still express, which is what Gregor’s family fails to notice. For Banner, he was feared and hated for being a monster, and so he thought of an end.

 
 "In case you needed to kill me, but you can't! I know! I tried!... I got low. I didn't see an end, so I put a bullet in my mouth... and the other guy spit it out!"  
Banner would choose to die as a human instead of unleashing the monster to the world, which is what Gregor chose to do. As Gregor clung desperately to the picture on the wall, he realized just how much he wanted to be human, and when he discovers in end that there was no point in his existence any longer, he laid on the floor and died a human instead of accepting the fate of a monster, his final act of concern for his family.
It is sad to think that Gregor's family never realized his sacrifice for them and still think of him as a monster, but it is even sadder that Gregor never realized the larger role he played in his family's lives in being human, which is the opposite from the Hulk, who was able to escape the monster status and be revered as a hero. As Nabokov Vladimir had said, “Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard covering of his back. This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.”

 

Drawings by Chris G. Check out his work!