No matter how you analyze this creeptastic carnival of a book, you'll set it down with a feeling that is equal parts horror and deep amazement. Heavy stuff indeed for a story about a cockroach who likes to slurp putrid waste and hang upside down from the ceiling.
And others view Gregor's monstrous insect form as representing Gregor's radical refusal to submit to society's values and conventions, much in the same way as the Nietzschean Übermensch. A Marxist would read Gregor's inability to work as a protest against the dehumanizing and self-alienating effects of working in a capitalistic society. Gregor's conflict with his father and the dream-like quality of the story is seen as a nod to both Freud's analysis of dreams and the Oedipal complex. Other critics point to Kafka's readings of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as a way into the complex philosophical themes of this warped little fairy tale. Or is philosophical/political analysis more your style? You're covered. Gregor's transformation into a puke-inducing parasite is often viewed as an expression of Kafka's feelings of isolation and inferiority. Dude had every reason to feel alone: not only was he a German speaker living in Czech Prague, and a Jew living in hyper anti-Semitic times, but Kafka also felt enormous pressure to become a successful businessman like his father. A lot of critics look to Kafka's biographical and historical context to argue that this story, published in 1912, expresses Kafka's personal sense of alienation. Like biographical analysis? You're in luck. And there is way more than one way to analyze a novella that has crawled, cockroach-like, inside the collective brainpan of the international reading public. To use a nasty phrase that we think Kafka would have liked: there is more than one way to skin a cat (gross). Perhaps it's because of the story's nightmare-meets-contents-of-a-Google Calendar quality that a veritable critical industry has been devoted to figuring out exactly what the story is all about (besides a warning against throwing apples at your son). Gregor's totally abrupt and unexplained transformation is juxtaposed with a lot of really mundane day-to-day details (waking up late, cleaning house) and the result is, well, textbook Kafkaesque. The Metamorphosis is a story about a man, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up as a gigantic, incredibly disgusting bug. And The Metamorphosis is considered to be about as Kafkaesque as Kafka gets. You don't get your last name turned into a synonym for deeply disturbed alienation unless you write some pretty messed-up stuff.
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