Hunter Farish’s Reviews > The Metamorphosis > Status Update

“In their original form, Kafka’s animal figures possess this affirmatively rescuing significance [that can be seen in Grimm’s fairy tales and other folk stories].” They save the hero from their own disownment of their natural desires—the desires that are shirked in preference of the businesses they work for or the firms that pay them.

More on ‘one’ vs ‘self’: “since the self is not the ‘inner being’ that is understood and that is ‘one’s own,’ it must assume the form of something that is external and strange; but it must be in the form of something strange that breaks through the external, empirically-rational everyday world.” he demonstrates that this happens and ‘The Trial,’ as well (Pg. 123-124).

(2/2) This is so clear in Samsa’s case that it presents LITERALLY as an alien; with the assumption of this alien identity, he also shirks the responsibility of his objective ‘one’ identity — no more business, no more money. I thought this analysis of both his new body and new identity being literally alien to him was very cool.

(1/2) Enrich believes that his metamorphosis is from his ‘one’ identity to his ‘self’ identity. He explains that just as his new roach-like outfit is entirely alien to him, so is his identity as a ‘self.’ The business world deprives its members of a self identity as without it, their desires begin and end at financial productivity.

(1/2) Emrich’s analysis of Kafka’s delineation between the impersonal ‘one’ and the personal ‘I’ is insightful. He demonstrates well—using an earlier story of Kafka—the struggle of workers to maintain their ‘I,’ their personal identity, even though all is subject to the ‘office’ in the end.

(2/2) This is due to the understanding that he is thin enough to stow away under his couch, and also tall enough, when standing, to reach the door handle with his toothless gums. This quote is also a good insight: “it would stand to reason that he was changed into precisely the animal which he—and other European salesmen—dreaded most when they entered the cheap and dirty hotels open to them on their route.”

(1/2) Though I don’t know how important the delineation really is, I think Politzer’s view that his newfound form was more akin to a bedbug than to the common imagination of him as a cockroach is apt.

(3/2) he essentially believes he needs to deny his condition; he thinks that to stave off the disease, he needs to deny the inclinations thereof. If he is to give in to it, it will surely consume him. He says about his sudden desire to maintain his human surroundings “and if the furniture prevented him from carrying on this senseless crawling around, then that was no loss but rather a greater advantage.”

(2/2) he then explains that this raddled him — that he hadn’t yet considered how removing his human furniture may change his state of mind. He explains that this change — from the mindset of a human with a temporary condition to the embodiment of the condition with a memory of humanness — had already begun, and that it needed to be halted. This idea of course relies on the possibility of regaining humanness..

(1/2 )Really just a shockingly harrowing story to this point. I think this current section is really interesting. His mother comes in and raises the idea that moving furniture out of his room may be bad, as it would destroy the remnants of his human past.