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Bending Reality in The Metamorphosis

There are many dreamlike qualities in the beginning of The Metamorphosis. The way that Gregor thinks when he wakes up 'Oh I'm a bug. But it would suck if the Chief Clerk dropped by and accuses me of being lazy' and how that later actually happen is a very dreamlike quality. Like, if anyone has ever had a kind of bad dream, and you think 'You know, it'd be much worse if _______ were to happen', and then a kind of gravity-like force pulls you into that situation, that is exactly how the novella begins.

However, Kafka clearly distinguishes that "It was no dream." (1). Why would he do that?

Taking a step back, and looking at the story itself, as a short story/novella about a human that's turned into a bug, it really feels as though it's inviting the reader to argue with the book, instead of actually trying to read it. To combat this, Kafka uses the absurdity of the situation itself, in that there is an actual human that has turned into an actual bug, that is actually worried about getting to work, to acclimate the reader into the fictional world that Kafka has created.

By utilizing the 'dreamlike' qualities of this fictional world and creating such a ridiculous situation that would simply be impossible in our everyday world, Kafka has allowed for the reader to accept the world that he has made, by distinguishing it from our own world. A world that closely resembles ours in its function, but has discontinuities that separate it from our world, and allow the situation of a man turned bug to exist.

Comments

  1. TinaOctober 14, 2017 at 5:45 PM

    I agree with your post wholeheartedly. By making his novel so surreal, Kafka makes it really easy for the reader to separate this world with Gregor the monstrous vermin from our world without monstrous vermin (probably, hopefully), and so shifts the focus from "is this even possible?" to "wow I can't believe how awful it must be for Gregor" (or something like that). I can think of lots of books where authors don't establish the fact that it's a different world clearly enough (and so I, and probably other people, think of the setting as just an extension of our world today), and so lots of questions along the lines of "plot hole" or "this doesn't make sense" spring up.

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