The Metamorphosis By Kafka

In one of his seven short talks written for a series of radio broadcasts Maurice Merleau-Ponty, arguing that ‘our era is destined to judge itself not from on high […] but in a certain sense from below’, provides this literary example: ‘Kafka imagines a man who has metamorphosed into a strange insect and who looks at his family through the eyes of such an insect’. By referring to ‘The Metamorphosis’ (and also to ‘Investigations of a dog’ in the following sentence) the French philosopher suggests how Kafka’s choice for an animal point of view is an attempt to describe societies trapped in the carapace of customs which they themselves have adopted. Kafka’s depiction of animality, especially in some short stories, is, in fact, one of the stylistic
and thematic elements that make his body of work an uncanny representation of the human condition. This essay aims to show that this is due to the fact that Kafka often chooses to represent animals (or men) as hybrid beings.
Kafka wrote several short stories with animal figures as protagonists.
I will focus on two of them, ‘The Metamorphosis’ (written in 1912, published three years later) and ‘A Report to an Academy’ (written and published in 1917), because they display complementary characters that both conduct their life in a sort of zone of indiscernibility. Animality means in these stories not just a beastlike condition or a revolting shape. It is rather an indistinguishable state which the two protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Red Peter, shares in different directions. The fist short story is a third-person narration, in which a travelling salesman wakes up to find himself transformed in an ungeheures Ungeziefer, ‘a gigantic insect’. Kafka’s implacable eyes follow Gregor gradually losing all his old human senses, which had articulated the shapes of the world for him, and even the relationship with his family, until he dies of starving, rejected by everyone. The second, instead, is an autobiographical report written by an ape, a chimpanzee, to explain to a learned society his development since he was captured and brought to Europe. He is now a famous star of the variety halls, famous not just as a mimic of human behaviour but also for his ability to read and write, to think rationally, to digest human knowledge; he has acquired what he calls ‘the cultural level of an average European’. Therefore, any reader faces here creatures in transition between two species: Kafka tells the devolution of a
clerk into an insect and the evolutionary narrative of an ape turned human.
A possible source for Kafka’s interest in literary representations of animals could be Jonathan Swift’s account of the Houyhnhnms in part four of Gulliver’s travels, and, concerning ‘A Report to an Academy’, also a little work of E.
T. A. Hoffmann, included in the latter’s Kreisleriana and entitled ‘Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann’, which consists mainly of a long letter that a trained ape writes to a young female whom he wants to impress with the account of his acquisition of human culture. But, unlike in Swift’s novel, Kafka’s surrealistic short stories have not satirical intentions. In these two hybrid fictions, the animal is rather represented ‘as a figure of pathos’. Animality is something to escape, whereas humanity is something which is always impossible to understand at all. Gregor will never become definitely a bug or a cockroach. Even if no human sense is left but hearing, he still keeps his emotions: dreams, a few seizures of megalomania, absurd hopes, memories. He is a divided creature, something that oscillates between animal and man and does not have the strength for a complete metamorphosis. After his father’s attack, Gregor suffers terribly from the wound. At the beginning of the third chapter he lives in his room – no longer a man, not yet an animal – as a degraded figure, who pretends to forget that his family secretly wishes to get rid of
him:

The serious injury done to Gregor, which disabled him for more than a month, […] seemed to have made even his father recollect that Gregor was a member of the family, despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not to be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty required the suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience. Unlike Gregor, Red Peter is aware of what being an animal or a human being means. The ape is a creature burdened with an alienation for which he is not responsible and faced with the likelihood of a life in a cage, the only purpose of which is the amusement of human beings. He recognises that freedom is inaccessible for an animal, indeed he is not sure what freedom is. The strenuous effort of mimicry and acquiring human capacities itself divorces him more sharply from ape life, and of course does not make him a human being; but – as Roy Pascal points out – ‘it keeps an outlet open, even though he cannot know where this outlet will lead’. Every such decision and the capacities he acquires are, he knows, little in themselves, but they are important since they keep a way open. The ape explains what he means for ‘a way out’ in the following passage: