The story of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is one which deicts many problems within the Samsa household. A problem which the family faces is the struggle between the selfless or unselfishness and the selfish. Gregor Samsa and his sister, Grete Samsa, are considered to be unselfish while their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, are the selfish ones. Ironic. One would think the parents would be the ones to sacrifice for their children but that’s another topic.
To start off, a very important questions needs to be asked. What is selfishness and unselfishness? Another important question is how they affect a relationship. According to David Farrugia in his article, Selfishness, Greed, and Counseling, Jencks (1990) defines selfishness and unselfishness. He states:
Selfishness as an individual’s concern solely for his or her own personal welfare without including the welfare of others or as behaviors that indicates a lack of concern for the welfare of others. Also included in his definition is the observation that selfishness includes cases when concern for others is only an instrumental means of promoting one’s own selfish ends, and the concern ceases when those ends can be achieved. He understood unselfishness to be actions and feelings that address the long-term welfare of others as important and independent of the effects on one’s own welfare (Farrugia 119).
Berkey (1987) says that there is a difference between healthy selfishness and unhealthy selfishness. Healthy selfishness is “a person tending to his or her own needs without ignoring or hurting others,” and unhealthy selfishness is being “a preoccupation with personal gratification with little regard for the feelings of others” (Farrugia 119).
According to the definitions given, one can claim Gregor Samsa to be unselfish. As the only breadwinner, Gregor provides for his entire family. His occupation as a traveling salesman requires him to wake up extremely early in the mornings to get his day started. He dislikes his job, but he is his boss’s favorite employee because he shows up every day and on time. The one day he does not show up for work and ends up being reprimanded for it happens to be the day he wakes as a dung beetle. As he lays in bed, observing his new body and trying to get out of bed, he thinks:
Getting up early like this…makes you totally idiotic. People must have their sleep. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women. For instance, when during the course of the morning I go back to the hotel to copy out the orders I’ve received, those fine gentlemen are just having their breakfast. I should try that with my boss; I’d be fired on the spot. Anyway, who knows whether that wouldn’t be a good thing for me after all. If I didn’t hold myself back because of my parents, I would have quit long ago (Kafka 12).
Gregor was trying to pay off his parents’ debt from their failed business. As a bug, Gregor was still more concerned about going to work and providing for his family then of his physical condition. Kafka states Gregor “was eager to learn what the others…would say when they saw him. If they got frightened, then Gregor would have no further responsibility and could be calm. But if they accepted everything calmly, then he, too, would have no cause to be upset, and if he hurried, he could really be at the station at eight o’clock” (18). Gregor cared more about what his family and boss thought of him and not letting anyone down, both his family and his boss financially, than his physical condition of being a beetle. “Although I am also bound to state that we business people – unfortunately or fortunately, according to how you look at it – very often simply have to overcome a slight indisposition out of regard for the business” (Kafka 16). Kafka also states that
Gregor’s concern…had been to do everything in his power to make his family forget as quickly as possible to commercial disaster that had reduced them all to complete hopelessness…Gregor subsequently earned so much money that he enabled to shoulder the expenses of the entire family, and did so. They [his family] had grown used to it, the family as well as Gregor; they accepted the money gratefully, he handed it over gladly, but no particularly warm feelings were generated any longer. Only his sister had still remained close to Gregor all the same” (29).
Grete is considered to be unselfish because she took on the role of caring for Gregor as a vermin when no one else wanted to. “An aroma of something edible” was placed by his door, “milk in which little slices of white bread were floating,” for him to eat by his sister for she knew milk was his favorite beverage (Kafka 24-25), but he did not care for the milk. Gregor wondered if his sister would notice he did not drink the milk or eat the bread which was floating inside. Grete definitely did notice and “she picked it up at once, not with her bare hands, of course, but with a rag, and carried it out” (Kafka 26). However, Gregor
Could never have guessed what his sister in her kindness actually did. In order to test his likings, she brought him a big selection, all spread out on an old newspaper. There were old, half rotten vegetables; bones from their supper, coated with a white gravy that had solidified; a few raisins and almonds; a cheese that two days earlier Gregor would have considered inedible; a dry slice of bread, a slice of bread and butter, and a slice of salted bread and butter. In addition she set down the basin that had probably been designated permanently for Gregor; she had now poured water into it. And from a feeling of delicacy, since she knew Gregor wouldn’t eat in her presence, she withdrew hastily and even turned the key in the lock so that Gregor would see he could make himself as comfortable as he wished (Kafka 26-27).
Grete fed Gregor twice a day, when their parents and maid was not present. “Surely they didn’t want Gregor to starve, either, but perhaps they couldn’t have endured the experiences of his eating habits except through hearsay; perhaps his sister also wanted to spare them one more sorrow, though possibly only a small one, because they were really suffering enough as it was” (Kafka 27). Grete and Gregor were really considerate of their parents’ needs and wants despite how bad things might have been for them. Gregor has transformed into an insect, physically no longer a human being, but he still had his family’s best interest at heart.
Because his father used to repeat himself frequently in his explanations – partly because he hadn’t concerned himself with these things for some time, partly also because the mother didn’t understand it all the first time – Gregor had full opportunity to ascertain that, despite all their misfortune, a sum of money, of course very small, was still left over from the old days and had grown somewhat in the interim, since the interest had never been touched (Kafka 30).
The fact that his parents and sister had to find work made Gregor feel “shame and sorrow” according to Kafka (30).
Mr. and Mrs. Samsa are viewed as selfish because even though they worked after Gregor turned into a vermin to provide for the family along with Grete, they were not concerned about the well-being of their son nor their daughter. They did not care to help Grete care for Gregor and Grete would not dare ask them for help either.
He [Gregor] naturally had much greater control over his body than before…his sister immediately noticed this new diversion that Gregor had discovered for himself – even when crawling he left behind traces of his sticky substance here and there – and then she got the notion of enabling Gregor to crawl around as freely as possibly, by removing the furniture that prevented this…but she was unable to do this on her own; she didn’t dare ask her father to help (Kafka 33).
One could argue that Grete went from being unselfish to selfish for she turned her back on Gregor after he scared away the lodgers. “We can’t go on like this. If you perhaps don’t realize it, I do. In front of this monstrous creature I refuse to pronounce my brother’s name, and therefore I merely say: we have to try to get rid of it” (Kafka 47) Grete says to her parents. Grete was the closest to Gregor and she was the first willing to get rid of him. Even when her father tried to come up with a compromise, “if he understood us then perhaps we could reach an agreement with him…,” Grete would not have it.
“It’s got to go,” called the sister, “that’s the only remedy, Father. All you have to do is try to shake off the idea that that’s Gregor. Our real misfortune comes from having believed it for so long. But how can it be Gregor? If it were Gregor, he would long since have realized that it’s impossible for people to live side by side with an animal like that, and would have gone away of his own free will. Then we would have had no more brother, but we could go on living and honor his memory (Kafka, 47-48).
Grete was tired of caring for a creature everyone viewed to be disgusting and scary. That is selfish of her because that creature was her brother. Gregor never stopped considering his family to be his family. “He recalled his family with affection and love” (Kafka 49). Gregor knew the best thing for him to do would be to disappear. “His opinion about the necessity for him to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s” (49). Gregor dies during sunrise.
Gregor was unselfish and selfless as a human, dung beetle, and when he decided to die. Gregor’s death is an unselfish act because he knew him dying would make his family a whole lot happier and reducing their suffering. Gregor was right. After his death, Mr. Samsa thanks God. The remaining family members of the Samsa household finally get a chance to relax for “they not only deserved that pause from work, they absolutely needed it” (Kafka 51). Gregor’s entire existence, as human or beetle, was to serve his family selflessly and he succeeded.
Works Cited
Farrugia, David. "Selfishness, Greed, and Counseling." Counseling and Values; Jan 2002; 46, 2; ProQuest Psychology Journals. Print.
Kafka, Franz. "The Metamorphosis." The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. New York: Dover Publications, 1996. 11-52. Print.
The Metamorphosis was published 100 years ago this year. Twentieth century Germany was not what it is today. The world that influenced Franz Kafka played an important role in influencing the writer’s style and the text itself. Kafka first began writing the novel in 1912 and it is one of the few for which he actively sought publication; it was finally published in 1915. After his death, with the addition of more of his work published posthumously, Kafka became wildly recognized for his writing and would soon become regarded as one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century.
When the novel was finally published in 1915, it came after a long line of interruptions. Future first edition publisher Kurt Wolff Verlag first inquired about the text in early 1913. The editor of expressionist literary journal Die weissen Blätter, Franz Blei expressed intrest along with other journal editors of similar trades. Kafka, however, felt that his novel was not yet ready for publication so he spent months editing and cleaning it up for submission. The actions of World War I soon created another disruption that would push back publication until 1915 when a new editor for Die weissen Blätter, Rene Schickele, approached Kafka about the text, where it would eventually be publishing in the October edition of the journal. Shortly after that Verlag would publish a printed volume of the novel in Germany. Kafka would die after a long battle with tuberculosis in 1924, and while he continued writing up until his last days he requested that none of his work be published and that they instead be destroyed. Luckily for Kafka’s legacy, and for the literary world, his friend and literary executor Max Brod disobeyed these instructions. Throughout 1925 and 1935 he published collected works of Kafka’s, even those that were incomplete. As this occurred, Kafka’s work gained traction and his work garnered critical acclaim and created a sphere of influence upon writers in that century. (Bernofsky)
Renowned authors like Jorge Louis Borges, Albert Camus and Gabriel Garcia Marquez cite being directly influenced by Kafka. Marquez wrote about how influential Kafka had been to his writing in his memoir and stated that after reading The Metamorphosis, “I never again slept with my former serenity. The book … determined a new direction for my life from its first line.” (Cannella) In a 1981 interview he remarked, “When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn't know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.” (Cannella) The adjective “Kafkaesque” connotes a style where the bizarre and surreal create an aura of horror in a somewhat realistic world such as the settings used by Kafka in his works. While previously his works had only been published in obscure German literary journals, posthumously publications and translations became available to different parts of the world and Kafka’s name became well known. During and after World War II, his popularity only grew as the world descended into something as horrific and surreal as something he might have written himself; “it is as though Holocaust, Communism, Existentialism and Cold War all had to happen to validate a handful of texts written in the first quarter of the twentieth century.” (Hoffman) Even though the world was rapidly changing in the second half of the 20th century, the world that existed when Kafka was writing The Metamorphosis impacted the author and the novel into what it would eventually become.
While Kafka is never studied as being an easily comprehended writer, with new interpretations of his work consistently being analyzed, there are themes present in many of his works that deal with universally compelling topics. Feelings of isolation, alienation, and frustration with bureaucracy, society, and the world as a whole are all topics featured in Kafka’s work and particularly in The Metamorphosis. Kafka’s personal life at the time he was writing the novel was one of frustration and alienation. In 1912 Prague was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that consisted of different ethnic groups. While Kafka spoke Czech, the language mostly used in the area at the time, and German, considered the language of the elite in the empire, but he felt most comfortable using German—thus isolating himself from the majority. He was also Jewish in a world and location that was becoming increasingly anti-Semitic, while also not being particularly devoted to his faith, this resulted in him becoming alienated from both circles. His father, whom he had as strenuous a relationship with as Gregor did with his father, had been a businessman and while attending college he majored in law even though he found it frustrating to pursue. After graduating he got a job working at an insurance company, working within a bureaucratic system, and found his only solace in being able to work short days so that he could spend the rest of his hours writing. (Introduction: Stories After Kafka) These factors shaped Kafka’s life and these issues he had in his actual life were reflected onto the pages of his work and into the lives of his characters.
Kafka never took a position on any of the literary styles of his time; he was neither an expressionist nor surrealist, despite dipping into those themes. This perhaps adds weight to the term Kafkaesque, placing Kafka in his own category—and in a way, again, isolated from the rest. Throughout his lifetime, which ended shortly at only 40 years old, he never acknowledged his own genius and instead expressed great anxiety over having his work reviewed. Had he survived his illness and been alive to be the executor of his own work, the world might have never known his brilliance. In a somewhat Kafkaesque manner, he thankfully did die, leaving his legacy in the hands of someone who knew the importance of the work and the foresight to see how important it would become to literary history.
Works Cited
Bernofsky, Susan. "On Translating Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”." The New Yorker 14 Janurary 2014.
Cannella, Cara. "The Legacy of Franz Kafka As Seen Through His Impact on Gabriel García Márquez." Biographile 1 July 2013.
"Introduction: Stories After Kafka." Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka. Ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2011.
Hoffman, Michael. “Introduction” to Metamorphosis and Other Stories. New York: Penguin, 2007.
