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Ep 81 - The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
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Benjamin McAvoy
Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us as and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime with Hardcore Literature. Hello and welcome to the nightmare world of Franz Kafka. Today we are talking about the Metamorphosis. And this is one of the most bizarre and yet simultaneously most relatable short stories I have ever read. Which may seem like. Like a strange thing to say given what takes place in the story. Our induction into this nightmare reality is immediate. It's right from the very first line, a line that is the most iconic in all of short modern imaginative literature. Let's read and appreciate that opening together now. It goes like this. When Grigor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed. He lay on his tough armored back and raising his head a little, managed to see, sectioned off by little crescent shaped ridges into segments, the expanse of his arched brown belly atop which the coverlet perched forever on the point of slipping off in entirely. His numerous legs, pathetically frail by contrast to the rest of him, waved feebly before his eyes. How is that relatable, we might ask. Have I ever awoken from troubled dreams to find myself turned into a monstrous cockroach or a beetle, a giant insect or some vermin in my bed? The reality of what Frigor has been transformed into changes from translation to translation. But the original German is Ungeheueris Ungerziffer, a monstrous vermin. Kafka himself said he didn't want illustrated versions of his short story to actually depict any specific creature, certainly not a beetle or a cockroach. And he wanted illustrations instead to focus on Grigor the man, which I find very interesting. That's very strange. And yet the descriptions throughout are incredibly insectoid, aren't they? Yeah. He looks down at his body with the ridges and multiple legs, and he even sees a sprinkling of white dots on his body, the significance of which we're told he was unable to interpret. So he doesn't quite know what he is or why, but it seems like some sort of beetle. And I say this is relatable, but the relatability comes in the sentiment rather than the substance, the ostensible reality. And this is Kafka's gift. He literalizes the metaphorical who has not felt themselves to be less than human because that's what we're reading about here. Who has not woken up and groaned at the prospect of meeting their reality and then wishing only to go straight back to sleep and forget it all. What's the matter with me? He thought. And he sees it was no dream. There, quietly, between the four familiar walls, was his room. A normal human room, if always a little on the small side, over the table on which an array of cloth samples was spread out. Samsa was a travelling salesman hung the picture he had only recently clipped from a magazine. He saw a picture of an attractive woman in a magazine and he clipped it out, framed it. And then his gaze goes towards the window and he sees the drab weather outside. Raindrops could be heard plinking against the tin window ledges. And this made him quite melancholy. What if I go back to sleep for a while and forgot all about this nonsense? He thought. So Grigor sees this is not a dream and he feels that something's the matter with him. And whilst he recognizes the four walls of his little human room, he finds that he himself has changed. A metamorphosaurus metamorphosis has occurred. So Griegor's a traveling salesman and he is little more than an unappreciated cog in the machine of his company. We learn that he ceaselessly works. All he does is work, work, work. He ceaselessly works for a tyrannical boss, the director who fails to see or care for his humanity. Day after day he gets up early, he clocks in, he does his work, he break no time off, just day after day after day, working, working, working. And what's his motivation? Well, we learn that his motivation is the motivation of hundreds of millions of men and women around the world. His motivation is to provide for his family. And one can put up with a lot when that's your motivation. He's motivated to provide a nice life for his parents and his sister to provide them with an apartment. And we also learned that he has his parents debt. And we see that they have very much started to take him for granted, seeing him only as a money dispenser, a means to an end. They take his money but there's no real warmth in the relationship anymore. We see as Grigor flails his multiple legs around, he contemplates momentarily asking for help. He's rocking Back and forth, his big beetle ish body, and he's having a lot of difficulty turning and getting up. And he thinks that he just needs someone physically strong, like his father. And he also needs one other person. If he had two people, they could turn him and get him out of bed. But then he wonders, could he really have contemplated calling for help? Even in his extremity, we're told he could not repress a smile at the thought. We might think that we're often embarrassed to ask for help when something goes wrong. Something goes drastically wrong when things change, when we change due to trauma or some burden has become too much, things change and we want to ask for help, but then we think there's no point in asking for help. And Grigor thinks that because people don't help him, yeah, he is the one who helps others. And now the helper is helpless. The worker drone has lost his function. He has sacrificed himself, and sacrifice is a core theme in this story. He sacrificed himself and his happiness in the moment, day after day after day. He has given his life for his family and he won't be recognized whilst still living. We might think he will only be recognized once he ceases to be. A few paragraphs into the story, we're told that he thinks to himself, all this getting up early is bound to take its effect. A man needs proper bed rest. And he thinks of other travelling salesmen in his company who, when he's done a load of work already, they're only just getting up and getting ready and having their breakfast, and he thinks, I'd like to see what happened. If I tried that out with my director sometime, it would be the order of the boot, just like that. That said, it might be just the thing for me. If I didn't have to exercise restraint for the sake of my parents, then I would have quit a long time ago. I would have gone up to the director and told exactly what I thought of him. He would have fallen off his desk in surprise. Notice the language. Grigor fears the order of the director's boot. If I didn't work as hard as I'm working, I would get the boot. Again, this is metaphorical Lexis. We might think, well, you're not physically going to get the boot, are you? What would physically get the boot? Some sort of insect, some sort of creature, some sort of vermin would physically get the boot. Now, George Lakoff would speak, speak of the metaphors we live by. I love that phrase. What we say without thinking, what we say in times of need when we are in need of solace. The metaphorical, the cliche that comes to us contains wisdom from our ancestors fearing the boot. Here's the thing. Grigor has already become a beetle or less than human before the literal physical transformation. Because that's how he feels inside. He has the lived experience of one who has been treated less than human. He thinks to himself about a boy who works at the same office, and he thinks that he has no backbone. And that's interesting. We say that, don't we? Someone has no backbone. The same figurations that we use in English are typically present in German too, which should come as no surprise, as English is a Germanic, Latinate, mongrel hybrid of a language. When we want to sound flowery and sophisticated, we have a plethora of French lexis to pull up. When we want to sound simple and more direct, we use the Germanic words. So that boy, he thinks, has no backbone. And we think to ourselves, this is part of the humour. Well, the one with no backbone, Grigor, I'm afraid, is actually you. We see that for the sake of his parents, Grigor has restrained himself. He has stopped himself from living true to who he really is. If it weren't for my parents, if it weren't for the debt that I've taken on, he. I would march right in there and I would tell that tyrannical dictator of a boss exactly what I think of him. And he would be so surprised. But here's the thing. He doesn't do that. He can't do that. He has been repressing his own humanity. And Franz Kafka has a really tremendous aphorism. His art really comes into focus with his ultra short stories, his fragments, his maxims. He has a great aphorism that goes like this. This is one of my favorites. To anim is humane, to humanize is animal. What does that mean? Well, firstly, this is an ironic transmutation of a Victor Hugo maxim. To divinize is human, to humanize is divine. But also we draw from the animal world in order to understand our human condition. Don't kick a dog when it's down, we say. And if we're talking about ourselves, then we are feeling pity for our submissive state. If we're talking about another, then we are expressing empathy, sympathy and a desire to defend the defenseless. Don't kick a dog when it's down. What else do we say? Well, he's the black sheep of the family. That's a common one. My grandfather's family Used to say that about him. He was the black sheep. Isn't it funny how that metaphor and so many metaphors speaks to an embedded family history, agriculture, which is where most of us come from if we go back far enough. Most of us come from farmer stock, but we probably don't even have to go that far back to find that we understand the human as outsider through the lens of the animal. The animal condition and the inclination to do so speaks to a kindness, a benevolence in us. So to animalise is humane, but to humanize is. Animal, is animalistic. I suppose what that means is if you need to humanize, if you feel that desire, then what is the base level condition from which you are starting? Kafka, in that seemingly paradoxical maxim, captures the dichotomy of the human condition. We are beast and angel in one. That's the human condition. We tightrope, walk over an abyss of dread. We are divine and base. We have the potential to. To rise and to fall. And Grigor here, in his transformation, his metamorphosis, has not ascended, but has rather fallen on the great chain of being. He is now less than human because he has been feeling less than human. He's been treated as less than human for a very long time now. We might think that this, what we're seeing here, this is the consequences of Grigor's actions. If we think of karma, if we think of our karmic debt influencing what we become in our next life, and we can live many lives in one. What I find most remarkable as we enter the story is the fact that despite being transformed into this monstrous vermin, Grigor is concerned only and primarily with getting to work or explaining himself. Yeah, I've got to get to work. I'm missing the train. How am I going to explain myself? His thoughts are on the clock, ticking away, and he is filled with anxiety. We might think of the White Rabbit in Alice In Wonderland. I'm late, I'm late for a very important date no time to say hello, goodbye I'm late, I'm late, I'm late. And he's looking at his timepiece and scurrying away. How often do we look at the time, the watch or our mobile phone, in order to see how much time we have before this, until this, how much time is for the current activity or how much time it's going to take for us to get from one location to another. We look at the time either because it's going too fast for us to get what we need to get done. Or because it's dragging on, it's ticking away, and all the while our lives go with it. The sands of the hourglass drop to the bottom and pile up. This is a very common modern anxiety. I'm going to be late. I'm going to be late for work. We living against the clock. And sometimes we can be so preoccupied with that, getting to where we need to go, getting our work done, being on time. We're so preoccupied with that that we completely ignore the much more pressing and distressing issue. Wait a minute. I'm a giant beetle. I've just transformed. Something's not right. But we push that to the back of our minds. That's not important. I'm late for work. Now, maybe if we deliteralize the metaphorical for a mom, we would think, well, Grigor is unwell. Yeah, he's ill. And yet he's still continuing to think that there's a chance that he might proceed as normal. This is a denial of his mortality. Indeed, Ernest Becker would say that much of what we do in the world of work is a delusion of importance and a denial of death. We might think, well, if Griegor's not physically ill, but he is, there's a physical transformation that's taken place. We might think, well, you're having an existential crisis, Griegor. You know, you are living inauthentically, you know, you are living a life of quiet desperation to appropriate Thoreau. And yet you're still thinking, I'm going to miss the train. This is actually very funny. As David Foster Wallace would say, Kafka's stories are comic and tragic. His comedy is tragedy, and his tragedy is always a reverent joy. Now, Max Brode would say that when Kafka read from his work, his humor bec especially obvious if you read it aloud, it becomes much funnier than when you just read it silently to yourselves. And he said that when Kafka would read aloud, we simply couldn't stop laughing. When he read out the first chapter of the Trial, for example, he himself laughed so much that he could not read on from time to time. And this is surprising considering the terrible seriousness of the chapter. But this is what happens. Now. I personally laugh when I see Grigor Samsa bumbling about his bedroom as a beetle, worried about missing his train, worried only about explaining himself to his superiors and his family. I laugh, but then I get a pang right in the core of my being. And you might note that the word pity because we Feel pity, and pity is really important. Aristotle would teach us that pity needs to be there for the story to be tragic. The word pity grew out of the word piety or pietas. It's connected to worship the same way that passion is connected to worship and also pain. The passion of Christ, being passionate about something means the cross you would carry up to Golgotha. It's painful. And also when you sympathise with another, when you're in simpatico with someone else, you feel their pain. Their pain becomes your pain. My goodness, I feel so sorry for Grigor and those like him and the elements of myself that I recognize in him. You want to look after him, don't you? If you feel like you do, and you want to put an arm around him, you want to save him, you want to protect him, then maybe you want to look after yourself. Or maybe you want to look after someone you know and you want to look after him in the way that his family is declining to do. He is the one looking after them and has been doing so for a long time. And in so doing this has become a very one sided relationship and this is the outcome. And perhaps turning into a beetle is a figuration for having a mental breakdown. And nothing says psychotic break like laughing and crying at the same time. Waking up as a beetle speaks to our fear of transformation. Transformation is scary. We need to change and we change ceaselessly, whether we like it or not. But if we put a halt on it, that's not good. Everything is entropic by nature and so you need to change in order to slow the decay, the degradation. But we fear change because we are invested in who we are right now. And we're afraid of transforming and changing for the worse. We are afraid of becoming another, someone other than ourselves. We could see Grigor's transformation as a literalization of what he already is, in essence, non human. Yeah, he's just a beetle rolling dung up the hill day after day and afraid of getting the boot. We might also think that perhaps this is an unconscious manifestation of his deep need to escape from his responsibilities, his burdens. This gives him a pretty good excuse not to go to work, doesn't it? That's how invested he is in his work, how chained to his work life he is, that this is the excuse. Now, finally, maybe you can get a break. You've turned into a giant beetle. Give me a break. We get a sense very early on that his motivation to provide for his family is not actually from a place of love. Though he does feel love for them, and we see that over the course of the story. But it comes from a place of guilt. He has a real strong sense of filial obligation where he has essentially been emotionally coerced and backed into a corner. He's been backed into this poor condition of living, this non living. So he's in the bedroom, he's turned into a beetle. He's thinking, I've missed this train, I've missed this train. Will I be able to make the next train? Maybe I can, maybe I can. And then he thinks to himself, what if I called in sick? That would be rather embarrassing and a little suspicious too, because in the course of the past five years Grigor hadn't once been ill. The director was bound to retaliate by calling in the company doctor, would upbraid the parent for their idle son and refute all objections by referring to the doctor for whom there were only perfectly healthy but work shy patients. And who could say he was wrong in this instance Anyway, aside from a continuing feeling of sleepiness that was quite unreasonable after such a long sleep, Grigor felt perfectly well and even felt the stirrings of a healthy appetite. So even with this monstrous transformation, he's thinking, well, I could call in sick, couldn't I? I don't want to be accused of being work shy and that breaks my heart. I'm something of a workaholic myself. And I can't help but think, Grigor, you wouldn't just be calling in sick, you are sick. And too much conscientiousness can kill us. It can make us less than human. It can turn us into a beetle. And he thinks to himself as well, maybe I'm imagining things. Now he notices that his voice doesn't sound like his voice and he is of course encaged in a giant exoskeleton skeleton. But perhaps he's just imagining things. Maybe it's a head cold, maybe it's nothing. Maybe I'm just being lazy. He thinks, idle. You haven't taken a break in five years and you're worried that you're going to be accused of being idle or lazy. Notice that it's not the laziness itself, which is actually just a well deserved rest, it's the accusation. Yeah, you're living for other people. You either have a very serious complex and high anxiety or you are surrounded by people who exploit and gaslight and abuse you. But most likely a combination of the two. There's a great quote from the book, the Perks of being a wallflower, you accept the love you think you deserve. And Grigor thinks he deserves this. And he knows he's being exploited as well, he thinks. And if you're working from the Penguin, my recommended edition. The Penguin edition translated by Michael Hoffman this is page. This is about six pages into the story. He thinks to himself, why only was Grigor condemned to work for a company where the smallest lapse was greeted with the gravest suspicion? Were all the employees, without exception, scoundrels? Were there really no loyal and dependable individuals among them, who if once a couple of morning hours were not exploited for work, were driven so dementia by pangs of conscience that they were unable to get out of bed? What we see in this story with the dread of living an unexamined life, the life of a bureaucratic cog in the machine, we get a channeling of Kafka's own life. And this story is surreal and grotesque and absurd, but it's also autobiographical and true. True. And when I think of Kafka esque absurdity, I think of Kierkegaard's view of absurdity as ultimately a positive thing and a basis for belief. All belief is subjective in nature, which makes truth subjective too. And Kierkegaard would say that the absurdisms in the religious stories point to their essential truth. God incarnated into man, into flesh. He was born, died and rose again. There is an absurdity to this, but such absurdity, absurdity lends it a sense of believability. We speak of things being absurdly true. There is something so strange, odd and uncanny about certain things, certain paradoxical things, that we intuit that there has to be some truth there. Fiction is ultimately absurd. It's a distortion of reality, even when it is attempting to be a faithful distillation or representation of reality. It's still absurd when you think about it. And myth is absurd too. But absurdities are only surface. Symbols are veils that shroud the truth. And fiction is a lie that tells the truth. And the short stories of Kafka, whilst absurd, are intensely true. Poet Wallace Stevens believed that we speak in metaphors because we cannot ever speak literally and directly. Metaphors are hermits dressed up. And the same way that we cannot look directly at the sun, which is perhaps the foundation for all our metaphors, we cannot speak about things without their clothing or some concession, some compromise in our expression. That's why Hamlet scorned words, words, words. And why Nietzsche thought that that for which we can find words for is something already long Dead in our hearts. So what was Kafka's life like? What kind of life produced a story, story as terrifyingly perceptive as the Metamorphosis? Well, Franz Kafka was Jewish, German, Czech, and he was born in Bohemian Prague. In 1883, he would die from tuberculosis on the outskirts of Vienna as a citizen of Czechoslovakia at just 41 years old. And that's another tragedy for the world of art and literature. If Shakespeare had died at this age, we would not have the tragic process. One always wonders with these young deaths, what would have come into the world that never did? We would have so many great stories. Would he have ever finished his novels? Kafka spoke German, a Prague German which translators say renders strangely into English it can be difficult to capture the Kafkaesque syntax. He is not difficult on a syntactical or stylistic level and in fact writes in a very clear way. But there is a sense of dissonance in his prose that is difficult to convey in other languages without the translation seeming clunky. But he spoke and wrote in German. He spoke Czech, Yiddish and also Italian. And it's important to observe that the Europe of Kafka's day is not the Europe we know today. Indeed, the Austro Hungarian Empire, which Kafka was born into would dissolve during his lifetime and break off into different nations, states. And across the early to mid 20th century, there was an unbelievable amount of upheaval in Central Europe. A lot of migration, a lot of displacement, especially for Jewish people. Now, interestingly, there are few place names in Kafka's stories, though they clearly often take place in Central and Eastern Europe. And I think that sense of familiarity, yet strange obscurity and anonymity speaks to how Kafka must have felt like a stranger at home or a man without a home. And this is the existential crisis that we all feel on some level. We're all flung into this world and we struggle to locate, lay down and nurture roots. Interestingly, when we think of no place, we might think of the word utopia, because utopia means no place. But the no places in Kafka's stories are anything but a vision of good. They are anything but a utopic vision. They are dystopic, and yet they are also perennially contemporary. We do get some solid places in his stories, however. We see Russia is mentioned, for example, in the short story the Judgment. And this locale is one that is evoked as a cold, alienating, lonely land. And we also see America feature as a local locale. It's a hopeful land of possibility and a place that people flee to or dream of fleeing to. In the same way that the locales are often obscure, so are Kafka's protagonists. Now we get Grigor's name in the Metamorphosis, but often we don't get the protagonists names. They're just archetypes. Like a traveler, a salesman, a stranger in a strange land. Kafka captures a sense of Jewish alien alienation that speaks to a sense of alienation that we all feel. I'm reminded of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man, of which Ellison would say that in his novel blackness was an allegory for the human condition. We see time and again in great literature that the universal is in the individual. Zadie Smith would say that there is a sense in which Kafka's Jewish question has become everybody's question question. Jewish alienation is the template for all our doubts. What is Muslimness? What is femaleness? What is Polishness? What is Englishness? These days we all find our anterior legs flailing before us. We're all insects, all ungerzifa. Now Kafka would see the turmoil of the world at war during World War I, and he died just five years after its assassination. He would not see the Second World War, but many of his family members and friends and close acquaintances would. And they either ended up murdered by the Nazis or fleeing them. Kafka's three sisters would die in the Holocaust, his first fiance would flee to America, his second fiance would flee to London. And his close friend and literary executor Max Brode fled to Palestine to escape the Nazis trachea. Tragically, Milena Jasenka, who Kafka was enamoured with. And we can read their romantic letters to each other today. Though Christian died in a concentration camp, she was persecuted for her political views by the Nazis. Although he did not see the Nazi death camps of the mid 20th century, many have pointed out that Kafka's writing is eerily prescient of them. His choice of the word vermin, for example, in the Metamorphosis is almost uncannily predictive of the exact language the Nazis would use for the Jewish community during their campaign of extermination. We talk of exterminating pests, don't we? So how do you turn a nation, a people, on another their fellow men and women? You cast them as non human to justify your evil. As usual, we see that any writer who ends up being prophetic, proleptic or predictive does so typically because they have their pulse on the condition of the time, the current climate. Kafka was not to know what was to come, but it likely wouldn't have been a shock to him. Anti Semitism was rising during his lifetime and there was a great feeling of threat for those who were Jewish at this time. An ominous feeling of dread, anxiety and persecution. All of this is a key marker of the Kafkaesque atmosphere. But it's no unrealistic nightmare. This really was the lived reality of many at this time all over Europe. Kafka is celebrated as the foremost Jewish writer of the century and center of German, indeed European literature today. But in the wake of his death his books were banned and burned. And if he felt alienated and persecuted during the 1910s and 20s, it would have been a whole new level of hell if he had made it to the 30s. And fortunately so that was the socio cultural climate. But what about Kafka's work life and family life? We talk of the Kafkaesque as being a bureaucratic nightmare. So perhaps it won't surprise you to learn that Kafka himself was working as an office official. And he struggled to balance his work life and his life as an artist. Kafka's profession was in workers accident insurance. This was a century that saw an incredible rise in industry. An explosion of technological innovation and machinery. Perhaps one thinks of Charlie Chaplin's iconic speech at the end of the Dictator. And indeed there is much of the Chaplin esque in Kafka when he says, you are not machines, you are men. Perhaps one also thinks of Chaplin's Modern Times Times. Excellent film, highly recommended if you haven't seen it. With the rise of industry there was of course a rise in accidents and injuries and work related deaths. And Kafka's role would be instrumental in forming the rules and regulations of factory work. So his work was important. And perhaps we can see why David Foster Wallace found such an affinity with Kafka. If you enjoy Infinite Jest, you might read Foster Wallace's posthumously published unfinished the Pale King, which is set in the IRS and is filled with technical jargon and captures the day to day life of a career in administration. Now the thing is, Kafka was painfully unfulfilled in his work, although he was very, very good at it. He may have felt like a cog, but he was a seemingly intentional one. His artistic talents would emerge in his report writing and he found promotions quite swiftly. He was recognized and he was given a lot of responsibility. Now with the rise of the office worker. In the 20th century also came the rise of identifying oneself with one's career. From the late 19th century into the modern day, there was a real takeoff in all the different things we started to identify ourselves with. We see that we started to identify ourselves with our sexuality in a way that we simply had not before. We see a lot of painful questioning, of course, over one's nationality. What does it mean to be Irish, English, Russian, Jewish, indeed German. That was a particularly tricky one given the upheaval in the German speaking nation states. And so many German writers starting powerfully with Goethe and Kafka, absolutely adored Goethe. He loved Goethe, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Flaubert. We see so many writers sought to forge a national identity through their literature, through language. So we see the emergence of German literature is separate from any one locale. And we also see at this time a rise in people identifying themselves with their work, which has of course continued on to this very day. Work ceased to be an economic necessity and became a way of pigeonholing and defiantly defining and understanding ourselves and others. Now this of course isn't a new phenomenon, but it's always been a bit more class based rather than specifically career based when it comes to identifying another. It just so happened that certain careers were indicative of class. But we see with the rise of the tertiary sector and the rise of office work comes a widening of the range of different possible careers that one could identify themselves with. And we often are very keen to define ourselves and others by virtue of their profession. Job titles are like symbolic shortcuts to getting a sense of what another person may be like, their relation to society and their potential relation to us. There's quite a difference in how different people will react if one introduces themselves as working in insurance versus introducing themselves as a writer. I'm a short story writer. Have you noticed when you introduce yourself to someone for the first time, their demeanor and way of looking and speaking changes depending on what you answer to the question what do you do? And when we say what do you do? We mean for work. But we usually leave that qualification out. We don't say what do you do for work? We say what do you do? We recognize that Aristotle and idea that we are what we do, what we repeatedly do. And since most of us spend the vast majority of our lives engaged in some sort of work, it's understandable why this alignment and this identification happens. But people will make assumptions about you depending on how you answer that question, won't they? You might find when you introduce yourself to new people in the future, maybe tweak what you say you are and play around with it. You'll see that you get a real range of responses depending on what you say you are. Now. Kafka's co workers and superiors took pride in their job. But for Kafka, all the work did was take away from his artistic self expression because he was working during the day. That meant if he wanted to write or dedicate himself to his craft, he found he needed to stay up through the night. And he did that for his short story, the Judgment, one of his early stories, the first story we can call Kafka esque. He wrote that in A blaze through the night. And he would feel so dizzy the next morning that he needed to send a note to the office that he would be late. Indeed, he would take a week's leave in order to write the trial. But after three days of not getting anywhere, he realised that a week wasn't good going to cut it. He needed to get into the flow and work was a severe disruptor for that. All of this even impacted the metamorphosis. This short story was written in two sessions of 10 hours each, but the writing was interrupted by a business trip. He had to go away for a couple of weeks when he was only halfway through. And when he returned and embarked on the next part of the story, he realised that it had gotten away from him and he felt that this had directly spoiled the story. So if you notice an imbalance in quality or a change in the verve in the story, with the beginning being much better than the end, then Kafka himself would agree. And that was the reason Kafka knew he had to work in order to sustain life, in order to live. But very often we end up living too. Work, not working, to live. When the head clerk comes in to check on Grigor, which I have to admit, though this is a story, this scene particularly fills me with fury. When the head clerk comes in, we see it's still very early in the morning. He's missed a couple of trains, sure, but the director wasted no time sending someone to his home to check up on him. It's awful. Grigor has never taken a day off work and this is how he's treated. He's being treated like he's a malingerer, like he does this all the time. His mother, we see, tells the clerk, whilst they're on the other side of Grigor's door and they don't yet know what has happened. She tells him just how much of his life is given over to work. In the Penguin edition, this is on page 82. She says he's not feeling well. Believe me, Chief Clark, how otherwise could Grigor miss his train? You know that boy has nothing but work in his head. It almost worries me that he never goes out on his evenings off. He's been in the city now for the past week, but he spent every evening at home. He sits at the table quietly reading the newspaper or studying the railway timetable. His only hobby is a little occasional woodwork. In the past two or three evenings, he's carved a little picture frame. I think you'll be surprised by the workmanship. He's got it up on the wall in his room. You'll see it the instant Grigor opens the door. And meanwhile we see that whilst they're trying to get in, whilst he's not opening the door, he' sister starts sobbing. She just starts crying. And Grigor cannot understand why. He thinks I'm just a couple hours late. Are they already picturing me losing my job and leaving them destitute? We see the head clerk calls to Grigor through the door. And he says this. Page 83. Mr. Samsa, the chief clerk now called out loudly, what's the matter? You've barricaded yourself into your room. You give us one word answers. You cause your parents grave and needless anxiety. And this just by the by neglecting your official duties in a quite unconscionable way. I am talking to you on behalf of your parents and the director. And I now ask you in all seriousness for a prompt and full explanation. I must say I am astonished. I am astonished. I had taken you for a quiet and sensible individual, but you seem set on indulging a bizarre array of moods. He goes on to say, you're wasting my time. I don't think the best of you. I think something's going on here. We're suspicious of you. And I really don't know why. Your parents shouldn't get to hear about how unhappy we are with you as well. Your performances of late have been extremely unsatisfactory. It's admittedly not the time of year for the best results. We freely concede that. But a time of year for no sales? That doesn't exist in our calendars, Mr. Samsa. And it mustn't exist. This man is the voice of guilt personified. Yeah. Note the guilt tripping. And what does Grigor say back through the door? He says, oh, spare my parents all those complaints you bring against Me, they're all of them, groundless. And it's the first I've heard of any of them. Perhaps you haven't yet perused the last batch of orders I sent in. By the way, I mean to set out on the 8 o'clock train. The couple of hours rest have done me the world of good. Chief Clark, don't detain yourself any longer. I'll be at work myself presently. Kindly be so good as to let them know and pass on my regard to the director. So what's he doing? He's groveling. He's sniveling. It's not even 8 o'clock in the morning. He's apologizing for being human. He's had a breakdown. They've overworked him. He's not a machine. There's this constant anxiety in early modern literature that we are not machines. Yeah, we can't just work and work and work like a machine might do. We need rest and recovery. So he's groveling. He's apologizing for his humanity and. And of course, he actually is not human. And we think, yeah, you are a beetle. You are a dung beetle. Grigor Samsa is Kafka. And Kafka is anyone who has felt the pain of needing to subdue themselves to superiors that hate them in order to provide for those who are ungrateful to them. Grigor Samsa is anyone who has had to clock into an office job they hate. And Grigor is anyone, or indeed Captain Kafka is anyone who finds that the only time they can come alive is at night, when they are already tired from the day. We see that Grigor finally opens the door and he still thinks that his present condition can be overcome. He still thinks that he can get back to work. But when he opens the door, they are all in complete revulsion and they are horrified with what confronts them. The story becomes an insult version of traditional horror stories because the monster is us. It's our central protagonist. Grigor turns the lock from the inside with his mouth and his father says, look, he's turning the key. And then when it's open, they are aghast. And yet still Grigor calls out. His sounds are animalistic, however, and what he thinks he is saying or intends to say is not what actually comes out. He calls out, I'm just going to get dressed, pack up my samples, and then I'll set off. Do you want to let me set out? Do you? You see, Chief Clark? You see, I'm not Stubborn. I like my work. The travel is arduous, but I couldn't live without it. And he says, are you off now? You're going to work. Is that right? Will you accurately report everything you've seen here? It is possible to be momentarily unfit for work. But that is precisely the time to remind one of one's former achievements and to reflect that once the present obstacle has been surmounted, one's future work will be all the more diligent and focused. As you know all too well, I'm under a very great obligation to the director. In addition, I have responsibilities for my parents and my sister. I am in a jam, but I will work my way out of it. We might think, well, when you're in a hole, stop digging. I'm gonna work my way out of it. His life is obligation. It's burden. It's responsibility. It's work. In his personal letters, Kafka would talk about his life at the office and the depressing office desk, how it was littered with chaotic papers. And he would speak of knowing some of what lies on top but dreading and suspecting nothing but horrors lower down. Which I think is a nice metaphor for this unconscious. In the office, he writes, I answer my obligations outwardly, but not my inner obligations. And every one of those not satisfied grows into an unhappiness that stays in me forever. So often we are obliged to others and we forget about ourselves. And whilst I believe that service is the path to happiness and contentment and fulfillment, inauthentic service is not. Kafka should have been serving the world through his fiction. In another letter, Kafka would write, I am desperate, like a caged rat. Insomnia and headaches tearing at me. How I get through the days is quite beyond description. To be free from the office is my only possible salvation, my primary desire. It's not that I'm afraid of life outside the office. The fever that heats my head day and night comes from lack of freedom. And yet, soon as my chief begins to complain that the department will collapse if I leave. I cannot do it. The conditioned official in me cannot do it. That's an interesting phrase, isn't it? The conditioned official in me. How many of us have felt or do feel like that? This is one of the many reasons why Kafka is so relatable. It doesn't matter that he's absurd. Life can be absurd. This is more truthful than seemingly realist narratives. But notice that that's really relatable as well. He feels a sense of guilt I say, essentially, I need my freedom. I feel like I need it. But then my chief tells me, oh, you can't leave. The office will fall apart without you. And so the chains that bind us get ever stronger. And we stay. We stay. Not only did Kafka we see, wish to have freedom from his work, but he was also terrified of what he might potentially do with such freedom. He was burdened with the guilt of potentially seizing it and going for what he wants to do. Here's a question for those who hate their job. We might ask, do you really hate your job or do you hate your life outside of work? The fact that maybe you don't have a full life outside of the job, maybe the fact that your job isn't a full way of living is what you really hate. Sometimes we get so invested in our work and then we're so tired we can't do anything else. And then it swells to a disproportionate importance and we realize that's all we have. And so, of course, it's like the bird who wants to leave their cage. But the cage, whilst impinging on their freedom, is familiar. They know it. For many artistic types, we might think of another metaphor. The metaphor of the boiling frog, where you just turn the water up 1 degrees at a time and then you don't even really realize you're being cooked alive until it's too late. Many will escape into work as a distraction. They distract themselves with busyness, bureaucracy and faux importance because they wouldn't know what to do or what to be without it. And we see that guilt around work and needing to work was heavily conditioned by his family, particularly his father. In the year of 1911, one year prior to the Metamorphosis and 1912 was one of the most fertile artistic years for Kafka. He wrote the Metamorphosis in 1912, but the story wouldn't be published until 1915. We see that around this time Kafka was being pressed by his father to become a partner in his brother in law's asbestos factory. And because he was really starting to take off artistically around this time, this was a prospect that he couldn't even bear to contemplate. He envisioned the hell of a future life of drudgery in a letter to Max Brode when he wrote, I realised with perfect clarity that now only two possibilities remain open to me. Either to jump out of the window once everyone has gone to sleep, or in the next two weeks to go daily to the factory and to my brother in Law's office. The prospect of being taken away from his writing for a fortnight made Kafka contemplate suicide. He knew he wouldn't be able to sustain the sleepless nights required to write and work at the same time. And his father, as you may be able to tell from the depiction of Grigor's father, and if you read the short story the Judgment, you may be able to tell this from the father in that story. Kafka's father was an overbearing patriarch. He was abusive and narcissistic and controlling. Not only did he guilt trip him when it came to matters of of work, but he applied a lot of shame upon his son in his romantic life too. They famously had a row in which his father was very vicious about Kafka's choice of second fiance. After his first relationship with Felice failed, Kafka would write a letter to his father which you can read. At the age of 36, he was attempting to finally hold his father to account for his emotional abuse. And he saw his writing of this letter as an intentionally long, drawn out leave taking from his father. Although the letter, which is literary, it's poetic, it's very autobiographical, and it is heartbreaking. The letter never reached its intended addressee, but Max Broad would publish it after his friend's death. And thank goodness Max defied his friend's wishes to burn his unpublished material. The fact that Kafka actually instructed him to do this, the fact that he deliberately asked his publishers to let the publications run out of what was in circulation and not renew things, and the fact that he abandoned most of his work. We have three unfinished novels and many unfinished stories. All of this exemplifies Kafka's feelings of inadequacy around his art and his self and his worth. And all of this sprung up in childhood and was thanks in large part to his family. It's really painful to read his diaries because you see that Kafka struggled with a lot of self loathing. Anybody who met him thought him to be handsome and intelligent and charming and interesting. But he thought himself to be ugly and he thought himself to be unworthy. His work was unworthy and he thought that people despised him. Essentially, Kafka never learned to love himself and his romantic relationships would suffer because of it. And we might think, of course, if you cannot love yourself, how can anyone else love you? Milena Jesenka would put it like this. He was a hermit, a man of insight who was frightened by life. He saw the world as being full of invisible demons which assail and destroy defending man. All his works describe the terror of mysterious misconceptions and guiltless guilt in human beings. That's a really painful qualification, isn't it? Guiltless guilt. Kafka thought that his writing might help him purge through to a purer state where he could finally be loved. But we see that this was an end that he never really reached. And this is a defining hallmark of his fiction. His works are always in process. His works are always in the act of becoming, in transit to a destination, but never truly reaching it. We're in a liminal space in the imaginative literature of Franz Kafka. There's always a sense that we're moving towards meaning and wisdom and freedom. But it's always out ahead of us and we fail to grasp it. Which is rather akin to what the most horrifying nightmares can feel like. I actually love this reading experience though, because we see that the search, the journey, the process is the destination. The question is the answer. Kafka critic David Constantine would put it, like Kafka's fiction is, as Robert Lowell said, a. A poem is an event, not the record of an event. It is in process, it is underway. It is a means by which the clarification of truth may be arrived at and the life of its author and the lives of its readers may be changed. The truth is not in the writer's possession when he starts his writing, is not the recording or recounting of a truth he is already master of. His writing is his laborious struggle towards that truth understood. Thus the writing requires our participation in that laborious process. Everything about the fiction, its author, its genesis, and most importantly, its manifest workings, absolutely forbids reductive reading. Any reading that supposes that Kafka, already in possession of the truth, then merely inclined, coded it in the process of writing. So that the business of literary criticism is decoding. Any such reading must be wrong. Kafka's fiction is an act of seeking. It is a would be discovery, invention, engenderer of the truth seen. Thus its unfinishedness is itself expressive. And if the author, sentence by sentence, seeking after the truth fails to arrive, how should the critic? And that's very true. And this is one of the reasons why Kafka's stories speak to so many people on so many levels. Like with dreams, we have a storehouse, a common stock of dream tropes, archetypes and motifs. But two dreamers can dream the same dream, and it will mean very different things. As Carl Jung would say, the only one who can interpret the dream is the dreamer, and the only one who can interpret the stories of Kafka is the reader. We are dreaming when we read. And what you find in the Metamorphosis will speak to your concerns right now. And you may find something different in a year or two when you return to it. And if you read this story with a loved one, tell them what you see and hear and what you read into it, and then ask them what they see and hear and what they make of it. And you'll see that you're both responding to the same inkblot, the same raw shot dark test, but with very different takeaways. Although the dark, distorted mirror will always shift, contort and distort in different directions and shapes depending on your unconscious at the time of reading. There is a very strong, unanimous body of criticism that sees Kafka's stories as fitting within the tradition of Jewish mysticism. Two of the most revered German Jewish intellectual mystics of the 20th century, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, saw Kafka as a secular Jewish mystic contributing to the secret doctrine of Kabbalah. Sholem, who is considered the founder of modern academic study of Kabbalah, would read Kafka alongside his studies of the Pentateuch and the Talmud, and he would find the most, most perfect and unsurpassed expression of the fine line between religion and nihilism in Kafka's writings. His writings are wrapped in the halo of the canonical, he would say. Sholem would teach us that authentic tradition is always hidden and that speech and writing protect secrets whilst silence reveals them. And he would say that you can pronounce God's name but never express it. Thus, we cannot hear the name of God unless it is mediated by tradition, and then only in fragments. That means the Torah is God, and like God, the Torah is ultimately unknowable. And that means that secular scripture, like the writing of Kafka and I, would personally include the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Indeed, we could speak for a good while about what would make it into our secular scripture. That means great literature, in attempting to express and approximate the inexpressible, gives voice to truth that can only be revealed, ironically, without words and in silence. And when it comes to this short story, the Metamorphosis, I see the presence of the Kabbalistic belief of man having two souls. We have an animal soul which inclines towards the worldly, worldly pleasure. And we have a divine soul. And the animal soul can be trained into pursuing Spiritual pleasures by the divine soul. And spiritual pleasure may sound like an oxymoron at times because spiritual pursuits often involve spiritual sacrifice, painful sacrifice. And if we can read any sort of hopeful message into the story of Grigor Samsa, perhaps we can see the literalization of the animal soul into a physical body which is ultimately sacrificed for the love of his family. Now animal metamorphosis and great trials, great tests are common tropes in Jewish folklore. In Jewish Jewish folklore, transformations typically take place as punishment for transgression. But in reading into Gregor's punishment, many critics have seen Christian theology come into play too, interpreting his transgression in light of the first transgression and the Christian doctrine of original sin. Judaism and Christianity respond to the event of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in very different ways. Both faiths see the cosmic significance of it. But in Judaism there is not that sense that the essence of man's divine soul has become tainted, only to be redeemed through Christ. And it's interesting that a sense of guilt pervades Christian doctrine. And guilt is one of the overwhelming emotions that is contained in Kafka's story. Franz Kafka's religious expression is highly unorthodox. I've seen one commentator say that Kafka looks at his being a Jew with Christian eyes. He is not a Jewish theologian, but rather a Christianizing theologian who speculates on the Jewish situation. Now of course, Kafka was not a Christian. He was ethnically Jewish, but he was not a practicing Jew either. Kafka in adolescence would declare himself an atheist, though we might think from reading his stories that agnostic would be more accurate. And we see a rich layering of both Jewish and Christian motifs in his works, works which carry overwhelming and absurd existential angst. Works that feel to be hovering over an abyss of nihilism. Kafka may not have been religious, but we can tell from his later writings and his aphorisms that he did start to become spiritual. So critics have seen the motif, the symbolism of original sin. At the end of part two, we see that the father of Grigor Samsa is implicit in his son's transformation into a monstrous vermin. The change happened overnight, seemingly as a consequence of taking on his parents debt. Once the family knows what Grigor has become, we see them struggle to confront the reality of this nightmare. They are concerned, each in different ways, but they don't know what to do about it. Grigor hears his sister praying from her room she appeals to various saints, and we see that they keep him in his room, and whilst they don't want him to starve, they also don't even want to contemplate how exactly he eats. So they just shove a load of horrible food not fit for human consumption in there and eventually they start to clear his room out to give him space to crawl about. And this devastates his mother, who asks her daughter, doesn't doing this ultimately show him that we are abandoning all hope of an improvement in his condition? She wants to believe that Grigor, her son as he was, might still return to them, and then maybe they can just forget about what's happened. That's the thing. They don't actually see the creature as Grigor. Grigor is gone, and it all becomes too much for his mother when she sees a brown stain on the wall left by Grigor and she faints. Grigor goes into a frenzy and he starts crawling all over the place and then gets out. And when he does get out, we see that hysterics and all hell breaks loose. And in a really bizarre moment, we see that his father bombards Grigor. He bombards his son with apples. Page 108 in the Penguin edition, right at the end of section 2. After battling the animalistic impulses that are steadily gaining supremacy over him, Grigor is trying not to crawl too erratically. He doesn't want to crawl up the walls or the ceiling, because his father might interpret that as a sign of particular wickedness on his part. So he's going at a really slow pace. And then suddenly something whizzed past him. Something had been hurled at him. Something now was rolling around on the floor in front of him. It was an apple. Straight away it was followed by another. Grigor, in terror, was rooted to the spot. There was no sense in keeping moving, not if his father had decided to have recourse to artillery. He had filled his pockets from the fruit bowl on the sideboard and was hurling one apple after another, barely pausing to take aim. These little red apples rolled around on the floor as though electrified, often caroming into one another. A feebly tossed apple brushed against Grigor's back, only to bounce off it harmlessly. One thrown a moment later, however, seemed to pierce it. Grigor tried to drag himself away, as though the bewildering and scarcely credible pain might pass if he changed position, but he felt as though nailed to the spot, and in complete disorientation he stretched out with one last look, he saw how the door to his room was flung open and his mother ran out in front of his howling sister in her chemise. His sister must have undressed her to make it easier for her to breathe after her fainting fit. How his mother ran towards his father and as she ran, her loosened skirts successively slipped to the floor, and how, stumbling over them, she threw herself at his father and embracing him in complete union with him. But now Grigor's eyesight was failing him, with her hands clasping the back of his head, begged him to spare Gregor's life. And then, at the very beginning of the third and final part of the story, we're told the grave was wound to Grigor, from whose effects he suffered for over a month. As no one dared to remove the apple, it remained embedded in his flesh as a visible memento. Isn't that horrific? That's so grotesque. The grave wound seemed to have reminded even his father that in spite of his current sorry and loathsome form, Grigor remained a member of the family and must not be treated like an enemy, but as someone whom all revulsion to the contrary family duty compelled one to choke down and who must be tolerated, simply tolerated. Grigor is wounded. And when he is, the descriptions are quite grotesque. Quite early on, he pierces his side and we're told that a brown liquid comes out. And here I don't think the symbolism is lost on us. The symbolism of an apple pelted at you by almighty Father, now embedded into his side. So he's carrying original sin around with him within him. Now, there is another biblical story that is repackaged and poetically and mythically transmuted in this story, and that is the story of Abraham and Isaac. Now, Jewish literary scholar Kurt Weinberg, another man who had to flee the Nazis, would take, tell us that the etymology of ungerzifa vermin derives from Middle High German words that originally meant unclean animal not suited for sacrifice and yet sacrificed. Grigor is. He was sacrificed in life and he is sacrificed in transformation. And his father has accepted that, that his son is to be sacrificed for the family. And yet where is the divine outcome in Judaism? You've got the Akedah, the binding of Isaac, which is a test for Abraham. God appears to Abraham in the 22nd chapter of Genesis and tells him to take his favored son, Isaac to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt sacrifice, sacrifice on one of the heights. And he does so. He takes wood to burn and he takes a knife for the sacrifice, and he builds an altar on high. He lays out the wood. He binds his son Isaac on the altar on the wood, and he picks up the knife to slay him. And then, at the last moment, an angel of the Lord calls to him from heaven and stops him. Now I know that you fear, dear God, the Lord says, since you have not withheld your favored son from me. And Abraham sacrifices a nearby ram instead, and he is blessed with great fertility. Now, this story is read every year in the Torah service on the second day of the Jewish holiday of Rosh hashanah, which begins 10 days of penitence, culminating in Yom Kippur. Now, surely, for Kafka to qualify for Kabbalistic mysticism, there has to be a sense of salvation in his writings. In Kafka, however, we do not feel a sense of salvation. Maybe it comes for other people, but not for us. It's very interesting, however, to look at more of Kafka's aphorisms, because they are very deeply spiritual in a Blakeian visionary sense. It's funny, his stories can feel very nihilistic. Often they can feel atheistic. But we can see that there is a lot of spiritual intuition in his aphorisms. For example, Kafka would tell us that believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself. He would say that man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself. Though both the indestructible element and the trust may remain permanently hidden. And one of the ways in which this hiddenness can express itself is through faith in a personal God. And he would say that the indestructible is one. It is each individual human being, and at the same time it is common to all. Hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings. And very interestingly, and I love this, this is really quite thought provoking, he would also say there is nothing besides a spiritual world. What we call the world of the senses is the evil in the spiritual world. And what we call evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution. To his friend Max Broad, Kafka would say that we are the nihilistic thoughts, the suicidal thoughts that rise up in God's head. And Max would tell his friend that this worldview reminded him of the Gnostics, the idea that God is an evil demiurge and the world reflects his fall into sin. To which Kafka replied, oh, no, I believe we are not such a radical relapse of gods. Our world is just a bad mood of God, a bad day? Max would ask, well, so outside of this world manifestation which we know, would there be a a world that knows hope? And Kafka apparently smiled and said, oh, hope enough. Infinite hope, just not for us. That viewpoint, whilst clearly somewhat ironic, yet no less true, perhaps is present at the end of the metamorphosis. Grigor is alienated from his family. He watches them from his beetle like existence. He watches them and he longs to be a part of the family once again. He watches them seem from afar. They're living their lives, but detached from him. They're going about their day. They have to work now in order to survive in the absence of Grigor as breadwinner. And we see that they start to use his room as storage. And as time passes, they neglect him more and more, evidently losing all hope that he will change back to how he was before, that he will return. We see that Grigor feels rage and misery at his neglect. And we also see that the family takes on some tenants for the house. They want to get some money from rent, but Grigor manages to scare them because my goodness, the place must be absolutely filthy if bugs like him are allowed to crawl through the place. The heartbreaking thing is that Griegor is drawn out by his sister playing music. And we get this interiority where Grigor thinks, regardless of the fact that I am no longer myself outwardly, am I not surely still human? His sister is playing beautifully, we're told. Her face was inclined to the side and sadly and searchingly her eyes followed the columns of notes. Gregor crept a little closer and held his head close to to the ground so as to be prepared to meet her gaze. Could he be an animal to be so moved by music? It was as though he sensed a way to the unknown sustenance he longed for. The family do not see it that way. However, they do not accept his humanity. We see that his sister he's longing to have that reconnection with his sister. His sister uses the impersonal pronoun reserved for non human humans and vermin and inanimate objects. It. And she says we must get rid of it. Yeah, or they will be ruined. She says things cannot go on like this. You might not be able to see it, but I do. And then she says I don't want to speak the name of my brother within the hearing of that monster. That's the thing. They do not consider this creature to be Gregor. It doesn't look like him, it doesn't sound like him. And we know from his thoughts that he is actually becoming more animalistic as well. He has his conscious thoughts, he has his human interiority, but it is degrading to a more base level as time goes on. We have to get rid of it, she says. We did as much as humanly possible to try and look after it and tolerate it. I don't think anyone can reproach us for any measure we have taken or failed to take. We see that Grigor's existence is nothing but a burden to the family. The man who once took on their burdens has himself become a burden himself, and this is a burden that they are not willing to shoulder in return. We see that Grigor's final act of sacrifice is to retreat into his room and allow himself to starve to death. Page 121 in the Penguin what now? Wondered Grigor, and he looked around in the dark room. He soon made the discovery that he could no longer move. It came as no surprise to him. If anything, it seemed inexplicable that he had been able to get as far as he had on his frail little legs. Otherwise he felt as well as could be expected. He did have pains all over his body, but he felt they were gradually abating and would finally cease altogether. The rotten an apple in his back and the inflammation all around it, which was entirely coated with a soft dust he barely felt anymore. He thought back on his family with devotion and love. His conviction that he needed to disappear was, if anything, still firmer than his sister's. He remained in this condition of empty and peaceful reflection until the church clock struck three, and the last thing he saw was the sky gradually lightening outside his window. Then his head involuntarily dropped, and his final breath passed feebly from his nostrils. It's a very sad ending, and we see that the world gets lighter for the Samsa family from there. At the beginning of the story, when he looked out the window, it was all drab and grey, and it was raining. Now he dies. The weather outside is lightening, and we see that the future looks brighter for the Samsa family. Now they can shift their attention to finding a husband for the daughter of the family. And in a way, the family have experienced a metamorphosis, a change, a transformation, too. And critic Robert Coles would say that Kafka's Metamorphosis asks us to consider not only Grigor's deadly transformation but our own continuing experience as survivors do we profit handily from the human degradation of others? Is our comfort earned at the expense of terrible suffering? If so, what happens to us? What metamorphosis falls upon us? And I would like to know what did you make of Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis? Let us know and check out what fellow lovers of literature thought of this powerful story at the Hardcore Literature Book Club which is@patreon.com hardcore literature. We have lectures for more of Kafka's works there too. We have discussions for works like the Hunger Artist, which is my personal favourite of Kafka's works. And in the Penal Colony we've discussed the Judgment, A Country Doctor and the Stoker, which forms the Beginning of America. And we have discussions for so many more great works of literature. In addition to Kafka, we have an extensive back catalogue of lectures that you can access and follow along at your own pace. And at time of recording we are discussing Thomas Hardy. Then after Hardy we are going to segue into a appreciating some Charles Dickens. We've got book club read throughs for writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, James Joyce, George Eliot, Jane Austen, the Bronte Sisters, Cervantes, Shakespeare and many, many more. And we will also very soon be announcing our reading program for next year for 2025 and I'm so excited to share that with you. Thank you so much for listening today. Thank you for being here and thank you for discussing Kafka's Metamorphosis with me. I appreciate you deeply and I hope you have a wonderful day. Happy reading everybody and bye bye for now.