Bittersweet Bundle of Misery

            “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” (ある朝、グレゴール・ザムザは不安な夢から目覚めると、ベッドの中で自分が巨大な毒虫に変わっているのに気づいた。) – Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) began his first and only novella, the Metamorphosis, with this stunning sentence. He depicted a story of a young man who, without any further clues of how and why, sudden turned into a giant insect while he still has strived to live and feed his family.

            My introduction to Kafka is quite a strange one. I first heard of Kafka from Murakami Haruki’s novel – Kafka on the Shore (海辺のカフカ,). I had read the Thai translation of this novella about 2 years ago and I was caught by how Kafka began his story with one single, memorable sentence and how the story was so similar to the present day even though it was first published in 1915. Indeed the story began in an unusual way, but yet the Metamorphosis is not a fantasy tale but an incredibly realistic one despite all the unbelievable elements in the story. It was a tragedy and a cry to the corrupted, pressured environment from a little man in society. The protagonist, Gregor Samsa was a working as a traveling salesman for a company. His work was the main income source for his family which included his father, his mother (both of Gregor’s parents’ names was never mentioned in the story) and his sister, Grete. As Gregor turned into an insect, the first thing Gregor thought about was not the fact that he turned to a monstrous creature but he thought of how his family will be able to survive if he cannot get up and go to work.       Like another protagonists in Kafka’s novel such as Josef K. from the Trial and K. from the Castle   , the inspiration comes from nowhere else but the image of Kafka himself. Kafka characters were usually an insecure man with great responsibility whose life was oppressed by an invisible authority who controlled them from afar.     

            Kafka was born in Prague to a middle-class Czech-Jewish. His father, Hermann Kafka was a butcher with a physical strength and he often boasted to his children about his hardship in his youth. Kafka had two older brothers who dies infancy that left his family the only son in with 3 younger sisters. Kafka’s father posted himself as a “decent image” for his son to follow. Hermann Kafka imagined his son to have “strength, health, a hearty appetite, a powerful voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, a supreme sense of assurance, stamina, presence of mind, a knowledge of human nature and a certain generosity…”. And although Kafka was born a Czech but his father gave him a German education in order to raise his family status because German was considered the language of aristocracy. Therefore, all of Kafka works except his letter were written in German. Kafka was always on the race to please his father. He even entered law school and managed to get a doctor in law even though he had no interest in law and he never tried to get a good career in law because he wanted to concentrate only on writing.  The failure of following his father’s footstep and the failure to become his father’s so-called “favorite son” left Kafka a big scar. Kafka wrote to his father “I was skinny, weak and slight while you were big, strong and slight, while you were big, strong and powerful-built. I felt then that I was a thoroughly miserable specimen…”.   

            This fact was heavily reflected by the attitude of Gregor’s father (only mentioned in the novel as Herr Samsa) toward his son. Gregor’s father was describe as a strong man but owned a big debt to Gregor’s boss which forced Gregor to work without holidays.  Herr Samsa was the first member of the family who started to treat Gregor as an inhuman and attacked his son with an apple. Herr Samsa also despised his son for being a useless creature, inferior to progress and put the family in great burden. These also might be how Kafka felt toward his father and himself. At the end Gregor died from starvation and his family celebrated his death by giving the notion that they felt relief when Gregor was gone. Just like Gregor, Kafka died in sanatorium from starvation.

            It was not an accident that the name “Gregor” and his sister, “Grete” sounds very similar. Many interpretations said that Grete might be another side of Gregor and showed how much Kafka adored his younger sisters in real life. While Gregor worked hard and lived in anxiety, his sister was still a lighter side of his life. She played violin and took care of the insect Gregor. At the end of the novella, Grete walked out in the sun, got ready for the new step of life and left behind the memory of her late brother. And another trivia, “Samsa” is similar to the word means “cry aloud” in Czech.

            Unlike German authors from his era such as Hesse and Mann, Kafka tended to reflect his time from his own perspective. While Hesse reflected alienation of middle class in his novel “Steppenwolf” by using the narration of through the eyes of protagonist, Harry Haller added with his encounter with hallucinated inner-self. Kafka simply put himself in the story and made his novel became semi-autobiography.  Kafka’s time was during modernism and the peak of industrialism which was not much from the world we see today. People became workers for companies and became only small fracture in the whole current of workforce. Gregor was a victim of capitalism and employment system. He was a university graduated who fell under the system  inspite of democracy which supposd to be the fruit from Enlightenment and  modernism.

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