Ideas for defending paper thesis

In my paper, I make a claim that The Metamorphosis is actually not Gregor's dream, as clearly stated by the author, but the dream of his family, the Samsas. However, a contradiction was pointed out to me: How can the story be a dream of the Samsas' when Gregor has a different view of his personality than his family? The story is from Gregor's point of view after all. Both he and his family view him as a valuable asset to the family monetarily in the beginning of the novel, and both feel that he was never needed at the end, but he at points differs from their opinion of him, because he feels under-appreciated and is therefore resentful.
I want to point out that there is no discrepancy with how the two "units" (his family and himself) view him, meaning that his family could potentially be the dreamers, because he has no thoughts of his own in this regard.
 However, his resentment for his family is his own. What I want to suggest here is that Gregor's negative feelings towards his family due to their under-appreciation of him are actually a projection of their guilt onto his character. The reader never actually gets into the head of Gregor Samsa, but rather the subconscious of his family, which could be seen as better; deeper into one subconscious (because I am presenting the family as one collective unit) is better than shallow in another.

So, if I present the family  as one collective unit, it does simplify the whole multiple dreamers issue, but how did they get there? Argue philosophy of a higher dream world in which the subconsciouses connect. They meet in the dream world. They feel the guilt "as one".
Then again, this "dream" may be only that: a "dream". Not a dream, but an enmeshment of the dream world within reality.

Small Addition to Yesterday's Class Discussion

There was one point yesterday, during our class discussion, in which there was an argument: is Antoinette insane or not? Is Rochester insane at the end of Part 2 or not? There were differences of opinion, but generally people argued that both were concretely one or the other. What I wanted to say was that you cannot define someone so absolutely. Insanity is not black and white, it is a spectrum, and both Antoinette and Rochester show signs of insanity but neither can be wholly classified as insane: that is too much of a generalization.

Mr. Rochester

The way that Rochester sees Antoinette is very different from the impression that I got from her. I saw her as basically an average little girl leading a difficult life, or at least that was what I took from her narration. But, as soon as Rochester took over and I saw Antoinette from his point of view,  I saw her as  slightly crazed and psychologically a bit messed up. She obviously needs to feel safe, and needs Rochester's love and attention to feel happy. She is drawn by these needs to act in ways that do not become her usual personality, such as slapping Amelie, who loses respect for her, and then poisoning Rochester. He witnesses each of these, and ends up liking her even less. He acknowledges her beauty, but now he also recognizes that she, while doing her best not to, has developed a similar mental illness as her mother.

I think that this recognition is what drove him to sleep with Amelie, because she is just as beautiful as Antoinette, but in a very different way, and this attracts Rochester. Not only did they sleep together, but Antoinette heard, and neither of them seemed to regret it. I get the feeling that she is only going to commit similar acts as she did before, probably even worse, and be slowly driven to insanity. Rochester acts very selfishly here, and I must say, my opinion of him did not improve when i read this.

When I first met Rochester, I thought he was an agreeable person, and, like Antoinette, in an unfortunate situation because he is being used by his family to increase their wealth. It was plain to the readers that he did not love Antoinette, but he played her, in the sense that he made her agree to marry him when he knew he didn't love her, and pretended to love her until she loved him back. I don't understand why he felt the need to suddenly stop talking to her or pay her any attention at all. Perhaps if he had kept up his little charade she never would have felt the need to ask Christophine for a love potion and end up unintentionally poisoning him, which was the top of the downward spiral of their marriage. I also feel that when he realized that he had been poisoned (I have no idea how) he overreacted a lot. A chain of events led to this: first, when he got to Jamaica he knew that something was being kept from him, which made him paranoid. Thus, when Daniel Boyd's letter arrived, he thought that he had figured out what the great mystery was. Because he was under the impression that Antoinette was going mad just like her mother, her slipping him drugs seemed like the beginning. Therefore, I suppose he immediately jumped to conclusions, assuming that she was trying to make him sick, without even stopping to consider the possibility that she only wanted him to love her, as Christophine said.

Towards the end of Part II, it seemed to me that it was Rochester who was veering towards madness rather than Antoinette. He was acting like a raving paranoid, no longer narrating the events that occurred, but rather his own train of thought. He comments passionately that he "hates this place" and Antoinette alike, because she is the "mad girl" with "blank lovely eyes". Just his voice gives off an air of insanity, that Antoinette's never did until Part III.

I can understand why Rochester did what he did, but I don't relate to it at all. Perhaps the readers are biased towards Antoinette because we know her back story, but anyway I found Rochester to be a selfish coward who locked his wife up because he was unable to take care of her. I have no respect for him.

Annette and Antoinette

Annette seems to play a critical role in Antoinette life. But, I really don't think that this role is altogether positive. Antoinette knows that her mother prefers Pierre to Antoinette, because she makes it painfully obvious, and I think that this knowledge is only hurting her self-worth. This feeling of rejection from her mother just completes her feeling that she doesn't really belong anywhere. She does not seem to be too bothered by this initially, but she realizes that she is not English, because that life is so alien to her, and she identifies with Christophine, whose group she cannot belong to because of their differences of skin color. Christophine is a black woman from Martinique- an automatic outsider, while Antoinette is her white charge, but she's not fully white because she has black relatives, and while she may be a born white colonist in the Caribbean: by definition a Creole, and yet while she identifies with the Creoles ("none of them understand us [the Creoles]", she never is a place where she can be associated with any of them. She spends her time with Tia, who is black. Her mother, who is also a Creole, almost ostracizes her, hardly ever paying her a lick of attention, except to ask why she id wearing Tia's dress, not that she remembers who Tia is. She never learns to be a part of a specific group until she is sent to the convent by Mr. Mason.

The feeling that her mother did not love her that way she should have, or that she belonged nowhere, could have led to the mental problems she is now encountering later in life. She has mood swings, and ends up slapping Amelie, the hired girl, after she made an insignificant but rude comment. We the readers don't know how she met her husband, but my take on it is that she was essentially sold off, because it was hinted that this was an arranged marriage, and this would, if anything, only increase her feelings of worthlessness. She knows that her husband does not love her. He does not treat he in the loving easy that he should, and she is getting sick of it. Part of what contributed was the absentness of her mother when she was a child.