Can you love a Roach? Gregor Samsa wakes up on morning transformed into a beetle of some sort. His whole family depends on him to wake up every morning and go to a dead end job, to pay off the debt of his parents. After missing the train to go to work because, his little beetle legs can’t flip himself over, the chief clerk comes to check up on Gregor. The chief clerk becomes impatience and starts banging on the door. Gregor manages to get off the bed and open the door. There reactions were strange. It wasn’t that they were surprised that much but more scarred of his new form. The family now has to adjust to the fact that Gregor can’t work any more. His younger sister must work at a general store and give up playing the Violin. The dad and the mother have to start working again and they have to have two loggers come live with them. The family has to sacrifice so much because of Gregor’s new form, that when he dies it is a relief. The family now can move to a small town house and hopefully marry off the young daughter.
I felt that this story had a lot of hidden meaning behind it that I just couldn’t quite grab. Why was it that out of all of the things he could have transformed into he transformed into a roach. I though that this could have been because he felt as insignificant and mistreated as a roach. He had to work off his parent’s debt, he hated his job, and his boss was not very pleasant. It wasn’t until he was hiding under the couch in his roach form did he actually get to appreciate all the hard work he had done. Everyone has felt like a roach at one point of his or her lives, and this story exaggerates it. I think that the writer must have had a lot of self-pity for himself, to have made such a sad a pathetic character.
When have you felt like a roach? Would you consider Gregor a hero? If you transformed into a roach would you let your family go? Could the fact that the family was so frightened by his new form be a metaphor on how people are so afraid of what doesn’t look familiar?