“Had he really wanted to transform his room into a cave, a warm room fitted out with the nice furniture he had inherited? That would have let him crawl around unimpeded in any direction, but it would also have let him quickly forget his past when he had still been human. He had come very close to forgetting, and it had only been the voice of his mother, unheard for so long, that had shaken him out of it. Nothing should be removed; everything had to stay; he could not do without the good influence the furniture had on his condition; and if the furniture made it difficult for him to crawl about mindlessly that was not a loss but a great advantage.”(Puchner 227) Gregor is laboring to rejoin with humanity, even though he retains his bug form and will never be able to achieve that reconciliation.
After Gregor has spent some time as a bug and has started down the long road towards acceptance, but when he hears his mother’s voice and he misses her, she brings him back to the wanting for human contact. The longing for something he cannot have and, arguably, didn’t have even when he was in human form has prevented his acceptance and therefore