The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (2 page)

Kafka, being no stranger to the predicament of the exile, made use of his insider's knowledge in some of his most memorable short works. In "The Judgment," an exile in Russia who is never named, seen, or heard during the course of the story, exerts, while absent in every real sense, a defining power over the other characters—Georg, his father, and his fiancée, Frieda. The exile, Georg's friend in Russia who, owing in part to his extended absence assumes in the minds of the three characters qualities that he does not and perhaps could never possess, plays a pivotal role in the events that take place on the worst and last day of Georg's life. It is their three versions of the friend (at one point the father asks Georg if that friend really exists) that determines their behavior toward one another in the story. In his diaries, Kafka wrote that the friend is the strongest connection between Georg and his father, for it is through this link that his father is able to reassert himself as paterfamilias and his son's enemy and that Georg is able to submissively accept him as such. Kafka goes on to relate that the fiancée exists, in a tangential sense, only because of the father-son bond that the absent exile creates. She indeed reacts in the story only to what she believes that friend to be; her interaction with her fiancé is merely incidental.

In "The Stoker," which is also the first chapter of his novel
Amerika
, Kafka explores an exile's marginality as it exists in the face of bureaucracy. According to one of his diary entries, Kafka modeled this short work on Charles Dickens's
David Copperfield
. Rossmann, the protagonist, has fled a nightmare situation in his native land in the hope of building a new life in the United States, believing that he has gained a new voice—one that can turn wrong to right. Upon arrival in this new land, Rossmann speaks up for a victimized stoker, demanding justice for him from the ship's captain and other high-ranking officials. In a sense, he is arguing on behalf of not only the stoker but himself as well, as someone who was wronged in another situation.

Kafka maintained his indifference to formal religion throughout most of his life. Yet, while never depicting the characters in his stories as Jewish, he never tried to obfuscate his Jewish roots. Intellectually, Hasidism held a strong appeal for him, especially because of the value it places in transcendent, mystical experience. During the last ten years of his life Kafka even professed an interest in moving to Palestine. The ethical and procedural dilemmas presented in stories such as "The Judgment," "The Stoker," "A Hunger Artist," and "A Country Doctor" all bear distinct traces of Kafka's interest in rabbinical teachings as they pertain to law and justice.

The humorously meticulous style of the argumentative narrator in "Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse People," on the other hand, shadows the rhetorical conventions of rabbinical discourse. In two important ways, "Josephine the Singer" is the culmination of Kafka's shorter works: It is the last story he completed, and it represents the purest distillation of his mature style. Ostensibly "Josephine" is about the art of the voice. While writing it, Kafka himself had no voice. He was dying of tuberculosis of the larynx. Unlike his earlier stories, where dark, dreamlike details of plot are commonly found, "Josephine" is a work whose signature syntactic and rhetorical cadences stand virtually alone to support the depiction of a creature whose exact nature is being revealed and made to evaporate simultaneously. This allegorical tale about the evanescence and the necessity of art is, arguably, Kafka at his most masterful. His earlier efforts in the shorter, parable form—"An Old Leaf," "A Message from the Emperor," and "Before the Law"—provided him with ample opportunities to explore ways of delimiting the conventions of story narrative. Intellectually provocative though they may be on their own, as examples of the art of prose they can, in addition, be appreciated as tools that helped carve the pathway to "Josephine."

In addition to their moral and aesthetic dimensions, these captivating tales, taken as a whole, have a strongly sociohistoric aspect. They explore a particular culture at a particular time. Rainer Maria Rilke—another German-speaking, Prague-born writer of Kafka's generation—referred to Franz Josef's realm as
Kakaland,
such was his contempt for the sterile glitter and stultifying hierarchy of the Hapsburg Empire. But Kafka took it all in and transfigured it. This place, defined in this period, would not have become and remained so vivid and memorable in the minds of his readers had it not been for Kafka's artistry, which rendered it indelible.

—Gerald Williams
1996

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The Metamorphosis

I

AS GREGOR SAMSA AWOKE FROM unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his hard armorlike back and when he raised his head a little he saw his vaulted brown belly divided into sections by stiff arches from whose height the coverlet had already slipped and was about to slide off completely. His many legs, which were pathetically thin compared to the rest of his bulk, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

"What has happened to me?" he thought. It was no dream. His room, a regular human bedroom, if a little small, lay quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the desk, on which a collection of fabric samples was unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put in a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, sitting upright, dressed in a fur hat and fur boa; her entire forearm had vanished into a thick fur muff which she held out to the viewer.

Gregor's gaze then shifted to the window, and the dreary weather—raindrops could be heard beating against the metal ledge of the window—made him quite melancholy. "What if I went back to sleep for a while and forgot all this foolishness," he thought. However, this was totally impracticable, as he habitually slept on his right side, a position he could not get into in his present state; no matter how forcefully he heaved himself to the right, he rocked onto his back again. He must have tried it a hundred times, dosing his eyes so as not to see his twitching legs, and stopped only when he felt a faint, dull ache start in his side, a pain which he had never experienced before.

"Oh God," he thought, "what a grueling profession I picked! Traveling day in, day out. It is much more aggravating work than the actual business done at the home office, and then with the strain of constant travel as well: the worry over train connections, the bad and irregular meals, the steady stream of faces who never become anything closer than acquaintances. The Devil take it all!" He felt a slight itching up on his belly and inched on his back closer to the bedpost to better lift his head. He located the itching spot, which was surrounded by many tiny white dots that were incomprehensible to him, and tried to probe the area with one of his legs but immediately drew it back, for the touch sent an icy shiver through him.

He slid back into his former position. "This getting up so early," he thought, "makes you totally stupid. A man needs sleep. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women. For example, when I come back to the hotel late in the morning to write up the new orders, these men are still sitting at breakfast. I should try that with my boss. I would be thrown out on the spot. Who knows, however, if that wouldn't be for the best. If I were not holding back because of my parents, I would have quit long ago. I would go up to the boss and tell him my heartfelt opinion. He would be knocked off the desk. This too is a strange way to do things: He sits on top of the desk and from this height addresses the employees, who must step up very close because of the boss's deafness. Well, I have not entirely given up hope, and as soon as I have saved the money to pay off the debt my parents owe him—it might still be another five or six years—I'll definitely do it. Then I'll cut myself free. For the time being, however, I must get up because my train leaves at five."

And he looked at the alarm clock ticking on the bureau. "God Almighty!" he thought. It was half past six and the hands were steadily advancing, actually past the half hour and already closer to three quarters past. Did the alarm not ring? One could see from the bed that it was correctly set for four o'clock and so it must have gone off. Yes, but was it possible to sleep through that furniture-rattling ringing? Well, he hadn't slept peacefully but probably all the sounder for it. But what should he do now? The next train left at seven o'clock, and in order to catch it he would have to rush around like mad, and the sample collection was still unpacked and he was not feeling particularly fresh and energetic. And even if he caught the train, a bawling out from the boss was inescapable, because the office messenger had arrived by the five o'clock train and reported his absence long ago; he was the boss's creature, mindless and spineless. What if Gregor reported in sick? This would be extremely painful and suspicious, as he had not once been ill during his five-year employment. The boss would certainly come over with the health insurance doctor, reproach the parents for their lazy son, and cut off all excuses by referring to the health insurance doctor, for whom there were only healthy but work-shy people. And would he be so wrong in this case? Actually Gregor felt perfectly well, apart from a drowsiness that was superfluous after so long a sleep; in fact he even had a great appetite.

As he urgently considered all this, without being able to decide to get out of bed—the alarm clock struck a quarter to seven—there was a timid knock at the door by his head. "Gregor," a voice called—it was the mother—"it's a quarter to seven. Didn't you want to get going?" That sweet voice! Gregor was shocked when he heard his voice answering, unmistakably his own, true, but a voice in which, as if from below, a persistent chirping intruded, so that the words remained clearly shaped only for a moment and then were destroyed to such an extent that one could not be sure one had heard them right. Gregor wanted to answer thoroughly and explain everything, but restricted himself, given the circumstances, to saying: "Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I'm just getting up." Due to the wooden door, the change in Gregor's voice was probably not apparent on the other side, for the mother contented herself with this explanation and shuffled away. However, this short conversation brought to the attention of the other family members that Gregor, quite unexpectedly, was still at home, and the father was already knocking, gently, but with his fist, on one of the side doors. "Gregor, Gregor," he called, "what is the matter?" And after a little while he called again, in a louder, warning voice: "Gregor! Gregor!" At the other side door the sister softly pleaded: "Gregor? Aren't you feeling well? Do you need anything?" To both doors Gregor answered: "I'm all ready," and strove, through enunciating most carefully and inserting long pauses between each word, to keep anything conspicuous out of his voice. The father went back to his breakfast, but the sister whispered: "Gregor, open up, I beg you." Gregor, however, had no intention whatsoever of opening the door and instead congratulated himself on the precaution he picked up while traveling of locking the doors at night, even at home.

All he wanted to do now was to get up quietly and undisturbed, get dressed, and, most important, eat breakfast, and only then consider what to do next, because, as he was well aware, in bed he could never think anything through to a reasonable conclusion. He recalled how he had often felt slight pains in bed, perhaps due to lying in an awkward position, pains that proved imaginary when he got up, and he was eager to see how today's illusion would gradually dissolve. He had no doubt that the change in his voice was nothing more than the presentiment of a severe cold, an ailment common among traveling salesmen.

The coverlet was easy to throw off; he needed only to puff himself up and it fell off by itself. But then things became much more difficult, especially since he was excessively wide. He would have needed arms and hands to prop himself up, instead of which he had only the many little legs that continually waved every which way and which he could not control at all. If he wanted to bend one, it was the first to stretch itself out, and if he finally succeeded in getting this leg to do what he wanted, the others in the meantime, as if set free, waved all the more wildly in painful and frenzied agitation. "There's no use staying in bed," Gregor said to himself.

First he attempted to get the lower part of his body out of bed, but this lower part, which he had not yet seen and about which he could form no clear picture, proved too onerous to move. It shifted so slowly, and when he had finally become nearly frantic, he gathered his energy and lunged forward, without restraint, in the wrong direction and so slammed against the lower bedpost; the searing pain that shot through his body informed him that the lower part of his body was perhaps the most sensitive at present.

He then tried to get the top part of his body out first, and cautiously moved his head toward the edge of the bed. This went smoothly enough, and despite its girth and mass the bulk of his body slowly followed the direction of his head. But when he finally got his head free over the bedside, he became leery of continuing in this vein, because if he fell it would be a miracle if he did not hurt his head. And he must not, especially now, lose consciousness at any price; better to stay in bed.

But when he had repeated his former efforts and once more lay sighing and watching his puny legs struggle against each other, possibly even more viciously, and had found no way to bring peace and order to this random motion, he again told himself that he could not possibly stay in bed and that the logical recourse was to risk everything in the mere hope of freeing himself from the bed. But at the same time he did not forget to remind himself periodically that better than rash decisions was cool, indeed the very coolest, deliberation. In these moments, he fixed his gaze as firmly as possible on the window, but unfortunately the sight of the morning fog, which had even obscured the other side of the narrow street, offered little in the way of cheer or encouragement. "Seven o'clock already," he said to himself at the new chiming of the alarm clock, "seven o'clock already and still such thick fog." And for a little while he lay still, breathing lightly as if he expected total repose would restore everything to its normal and unquestionable state.