Not merely Kafkaesque ...

I read The Metamorphosis this morning.  It takes barely any time.

You can't do anything but admire the way Franz Kafka gets right to the heart of the matter with the opening sentence, "One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin."  There's no preamble, no context-setting and, as we discover when we've finished reading, not even the vaguest notion or slightest nod towards an explanation of the transformation.  One morning a man called Gregor awoke in his bed as an insect.  Read on, says the author.  That's as much background as you need.

I'm intrigued by the ways in which Kafka builds a compelling idea of Gregor the vermin as a physically repulsive creature from whose sight - or the idea of seeing - we instinctively recoil just like his family, the maid and the office's chief clerk.  Gregor the human remains an essentially decent, empathetic being.  But we don't like the bug.

It's such clever, accomplished writing because we're only given physical description in fragments, at different points of the story.  We catch glimpses of the legs, the back, the head but we're never given a portrait of the creature as a whole.  Our imagination, maybe our instinctive fear, is left to fill in the blanks.  As readers, I suspect we do most of the work to join the dots of constructing the vermin that worries us most.  I saw a cockroach as soon as Gregor struggled to get off his back.  The cleaning lady in the story calls him a dung beetle.  Vladimir Nabokov - a lepidopterist - was adamant that Gregor was neither a cockroach nor a dung-beetle (an "epithet only to be friendly" apparently) but a big, brown, six-legged beetle (even though Kafka never enumerates Gregor's legs).  I have no wish to contradict one of the greatest writers of 20th Century literature but I believe Mr Nabokov proves my point.  Kafka never fully describes the vermin into which Gregor is transformed so as readers - even a reader as renowned as Vladimir - we construct the bug that works for us. 

Franz Kafka

I really do not like cockroaches.  Some visceral part of me is triggered when I see one - or two, as the case has been in our house over the last week or so thanks to heavy rain or moving cardboard boxes or whatever disturbs those ugly wee brutes.  So - SPOILER ALERT IN CASE ANYONE HAS NOT READ THE STORY - I was even more impressed by Kafka's writing when I felt loss, sadness and sympathy for Gregor at his end.  

In real life I'd feel no qualms at crushing any cockroach that provokes me simply by being and being visible.  Kafka, however, may have intended me to reflect on what Gregor's story tells us.  The facts of his life are pretty straightforward we're told.  Life is absurd, inexplicable and short.