When Grete first was able to overcome the fear that her parent couldn't and actually accept Gregor for his new self: a giant cockroach, I had a lot of respect for her. Of course after reading only a few more lines this respect dwindled significantly. She acted remarkably immature, and treated her brother more like a scary pet than a part of the family. Once she stopped being fascinated with him, though, she really pulled herself together as a person: she went to school, got a job, started learning French: but at a cost, because Gregor was suffering for it. If I had to make a thesis for this blog entry, this would be it: Even when Gregor is completely dependent on his family as a cockroach, he is still the martyr. He has to suffer as a starving, claustrophobic injured cockroach, and as a result his family picks themselves up onto their feet and starts functioning again. This must be so frustrating for him, because the whole I'm going to subconsciously turn myself into an insect to break free of the hold my family has on me bit ended up with him still sacrificing his life and freedom for the well-being of his family, even if he didn't purposefully do it. This is just so ironic to me, and at the same time really heart-breaking, because he really can't stop being the sweet eager guy that gives up everything.
Were Gregor to accept that his family didn't really need him this whole time he had been working for him, the might have been able to move on, but he insistently recalls moments when he was most proud of himself, the glory days, in an almost Clarissa Dalloway-like fashion. He loves to think about how he was going to send Grete to the conservatory, and how his parents were so appreciative (not really) of his hard work. But really, while this was going on he was always wishing it would stop. He didn't like his job and had plans for quitting in the future. Or, was this just what he portrayed to the reader? Was he really savoring every minute of being a slave to his parents' debt? I think this is sort of ambiguous, and I'm having a hard time deciding for myself what I think he's thinking. Because he ended up in the same parents-dependent-on-his-situation position that he was in before but now unable to communicate or be human at all, I think he really is longing for the days of his bad job and parents who sit around the house.
1 comment:
There's an interesting article by Nina Pelikan Straus in the Norton Critical edition that argues that the *real* "transformation" in the story is *Grete's*--that Gregor has to "sacrifice" himself (the "martyr" thing again) for her to develop into a modern, independent young woman (working, learning practical skills instead of spending all day dressing up in pretty clothes).
While Gregor, based on the opening paragraphs, clearly hates his job, there's a masochistic aspect as well--he clearly *wants* to think of himself as a useful, valued, contributing member of the family (those fond memories you mention), even as he hates the means of achieving this. His whole identity is bound up in a role he doesn't much like playing, but he has nothing else. One of Kafka's central ideas, in all his work, is that we punish ourselves worse than any outside force ever could.
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