Examples Of Dehumanization In The Metamorphosis By Kafka

The entire story of The Metamorphosis is filled with the concept of dehumanization. In a literal sense, when Gregor wakes up and realizes that he is turning into in cockroach, he is the definiton of being dehumanized, as he is literally no longer a human. When I first read the story, I thought that Gregor was literally a cockroach in the story. The more I read the story and the more research I did, I realized Kafka uses Gregor turning into a cockroach as a metaphor of technology taking over peoples lives in the 20th century and metaphorically turning them into something less than human. There are various examples of this throughout the text. For example, Gregors parents leave him in the room with no food to eat but trash, something no human would do to another human. Gregors sister shows him mercy for awhile, but the longer he remains in the room, the more he becomes less of a human in his familes eyes. His family stops feeding him, they hid him from others, and eventually they just stopped caring at all. Gregor becomes completely dehumanized when his family starts referring to him as an "it." Kafka does this in the story to show how far Gregor had come, from successful working human to cockroach. Being that a cockroach is not a human, treating someone in the way his family treats
Defamilirzatin is writing about something described with awe and wonder. In the beginning of the text when Gregor awakes, he is not shocked or awed; however, his parents and family talk about Gregor thoroughout the text as shock and awe. The shock and awe they expreience is a very big reason that they begin to dehumanize Gregor. At the beginning they are shocked and in shock they don't know what to do, so they try to treat him as normal as possible. However, as time passes and they shock settles in, they start to talk about him less and less like a human and more like a