Gregor Samsa awoke one morning a symbol for himself

“But I can’t stay in bed doing nothing,” protagonist Gregor tells himself in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” soon after discovering that he had awoken transformed into a monstrous insect (14)¹. He’s already noted to himself the strange appearance of his “numerous little legs” (14)¹, but the thing that irks young Samsa most about his predicament is not that he has irreversibly been changed into a nightmarish creature, but instead that he’ll be unable to catch his train and make it to work on time (18)¹. Gregor’s lack of character traits and prior life experience outside the realm of his career solidify the notion that he was an insect before—isolated, humorless, and focused solely on his sales duties—and that the titular metamorphosis has merely granted him a physical representation of his lifelong and preexisting existential condition.

Samsa’s life up until the point he is introduced in the story has been entirely dominated by his job as a traveling salesman and by his responsibilities that come with being his family’s primary breadwinner. Kafka explains in a chunk of exposition that Gregor “earned so much money that he was enabled to shoulder the expenses of his entire family, and did so” (29)¹. Nevertheless, his life is consumed by “possibilities of making money” and chasing after “commissions, cash that could be plucked down on the table at home before […] his amazed and delighted family” (29)¹. In his never-ending efforts to provide for his loved ones, he seems to lose himself as a cog in the service-industry machine. What is Gregor, then, but something of a worker bee, living out a laborious but mundane existence within the hive of society at large?

Tragically, his efforts to support his loved ones seemingly go unnoticed once his physical appearance is changed, to the point where his mother, “with her hands behind the father’s head, [begs his father] to spare Gregor’s life” (38)¹. He is completely isolated from his family, unable to communicate orally with them, incubated in his cavelike bedroom and separated physically from the outside world by a door he can hardly fit himself through. He shrinks from human interaction (31–3)¹, loses completely his sense of time and date (45)¹, suffers what appears to be insomnia (41)¹ and self-imposed starvation (32)¹, and begins forgetting his previous human existence entirely (34)¹. This profound detachment from reality and from the world around him might be his method of coping with his condition, or it may very well be symptomatic of it.

This isolation and removal from humanity, it should be noted, is nothing particularly new for Gregor. He has no relationships mentioned in the story outside those he shares with coworkers and his family, he has no passions or interests brought to light in Kafka’s prose, and very little is known about him but that he works in the traveling salesmen industry. Until the dramatic transformation disturbs the calm his family had maintained, Gregor lived out his days a relative nonperson, caring about his livelihood and valuing little else save the wellbeing of his kin. And what else would one expect of a beetle, a cockroach? The ultimate irony of Kafka’s novella is that the “metamorphosis” Gregor undergoes is anything but—in changing physically into the form of a lowly insect, he becomes more like who he had been the entire time.²