The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

What is the symbolism behind Gregor Samsa turning into a vermin?

Society made him a vermin, a situation which he can't escape anymore, his existence is challenged, it inevitably leads to his death.

Alternative meaning: Jew emo faggot literature, stop crying and man up.

MOM

"Im a faggot and my parents only love my sister and the money i can bring"

Or something like that

ironic slavery is also slavery

>society made him a vermin.

Wrong.

Him turning into a vermin was a literal switching of roles from the figurative forms his family were. As Samsa constantly provided for his family alone, they become comfortable and thus became cold, ungrateful vermin. Therefore, the irony is held in that Samsa turns into a literal Vermin, which forces his family to angrily switch roles, and Samsa dies as the meaning of his existence dies.

It has nothing to do with "society". It's purely Kafka's anxiety with the roles within a family brought into a humorous way on paper.

He is unwanted by his family and that situation is greatly amplified by him being a roach.

OP here, thank you.

Awake as a cochroach. Then you will find your true friends.

Rather than that, I'd say that what changed was society's (or his family's, to be more plain) view of him, for whatever reason it did. Imagine the situation. You like some of the weirdest porn known to man. Your friends and family find out, and they see you as disgusting, an outcast, a cockroach.

Then again, I wouldn't say that the symbolism is in him becoming a cockroach, or whatever reason he did it for, but rather how his family reacts to him becoming a cockroach.

>Then again, I wouldn't say that the symbolism is in him becoming a cockroach, or whatever reason he did it for, but rather how his family reacts to him becoming a cockroach.
No shit, cat rapist.

I always heard it was about him being a burden onto his family not unlike a neet or disabled person.

He was bit by bit out of the equation in his family he couldn't work he couldn't even speak he was just a burden who made life easier for them but the family was still attached to him for what he was before.

He becomes crippled and loses all value to his family. Notice the first thing he thinks of after realizing his circumstance is that he has missed the train for work and may lose his job. He makes a great effort to leave his room so he can tell the manager that he can still work and fails to realize the effect his appearance is having on his family and the manager.

By part 3 it is revealed that while he was slaving away at his job his family was fully capable of supporting themselves and when he becomes dependent on them they decide to just kill him rather than take care of him. Gregor did nothing wrong but he gets shit on, loses everything, and then dies. It's pretty humorous in a dark way.

i dont rape cats i cock roaches

How much German should I know before trying to read this in German? I've read it in English.

Good analysis ty

The joke is: he never was really a man before his metamorphosis. He was just a mindless insect.

he became the (((chosen))) one

Kafka realizing that he was a Jew.

You need to know 7 german

I took it very literally when I was a kid. I hated it for that.

stick those brackets where you can really feel them

He found out that he had some Turkish blood in him.

Kafka was a redpilled motherfucker.

Every Jew can perform the metamorphosis back to their true form. C'mon op, this is red pill 101.

people hate NEETs

good job frog friend

this, why is Kafka so hard to understand for plebs?

The only symbol it is someone who has something unfortunate happen to him.

The "Metamorphosis," is the transformation everyone around him goes through, because of him.

My mother tongue is german and it's a pain in the ass to read even for me.

>My mother tongue is german

Is that some slang way to say she eats ass?

I suggest you take up another hobby if reading kafka in your mother tongue is difficult; that or you're an american whose mother was german and left you with rudimentary knowledge of the language yet you use your vague and distant heritage as a way of claiming superiority over your peers akin to third generation algerians here celebrating their ancestry despite not speaking a lick of Arab ;)

Damn, you look even more like an idiot aftet reading Leave this place and read some books

My father used to read this book to me as a child and I think it became some sort of self fulfilling prophecy as I feel more and more like Samsa every day

What are you talking about, faggot? Kafka embraced, even studied, being a kike.

>/r9k/, the post

You have to be at least 18 years old to be here, kiddo.

I just thought it was arbitrary what he turned into and the outcome was representative of humans readily coping with a completely absurd world. I like you analysis but I don't recall his family being ungrateful before he was a bug.

I'm going to reply because (you) deserve it.

Edgy but I like it.

The main message from this story is that you should have spent the time reading Siddhartha instead

Oh fuck off.

>published in 1915
people who are 100 years old could have had this read to them as a child

this story gave me the fetish of wanting to see a cute girl get fucked by a giant cockroach. Fuck you Kafka

The entire time I just wanted Samsa to fuck his 17 year old sister.

there's this one girl in particular that I know irl who I fantasize about having sex with a giant cockroach all the time. Its legs wrapped around her, spasming and filling her with cockroach cum. She tries to fight it because she knows it's gross, she doesn't want to be turned on but she submits to the bug and moans with every thrust.

Why havent you fucked her in the pooossiii

because i'm too busy writing smut about her having sex with a giant cockroach. also she hates me

Hey user, how do I convince my older sister to sleep with me? She's in med school rn (25) and I'm 19. HELP !

is your penis a nice size? Get it nice and thick, not completely erect and wear pants or shorts or underwear around her that outlines your dick and balls so she can see how full it is. Do this for a while, implant it in her head that your dick is nice. Eventually she'll notice you're always chubby when she's around and she'll start to think about your cock more and more, sometimes subconsciously. When she starts acting awkward around you, that's your time to move. Ask her to bring you a towel when you're in the shower or something and when she comes in let her see your dick. Again, don't be completely hard but have it about 70% erect.

It's a fairly decent sized penis, but we live a few hundred miles away due to uni. Should I visit her and try to get her drunk?

lol no wtf

just have your package visible and if she eyes it go from there

Should I ask our mother for permission to have an incestuous relationship with my older sister? Do you think she will approve of it?

I think what happens in the Metamorphosis is that his room symbolizes his soul. When he has to end up leaving for another trip he becomes paralyzed, stationary inside of himself. This gives him an opportunity to self-reflect and in the frequency which he's living it becomes so intense it physically manifests. When the family tries to enter they don't want to see him, who he actually is, they prefer the version of himself as dictated by the motions of daily life. His sister is the youngest so she is not so jaded-- she can stand him, thus she feeds him in his room, keeping him/his soul alive. I would write more but I'm incredibly tired.

This. It's a transformation of the soul that he goes through, the dark night etc

Good reading. May I add that the spontaneous change of circumstance affecting the main character at the beginning of the story is a trait in several of Kafka's works, for example The Castle and The Process. In these two other stories, a subitus transformation triggers a series of concatenated oppressive mechanisms from the institution to which the character is attached. In Samsa's case it is his sudden trasformation that affects his relationship with family. In the Process it's a requirement from the justice system out of the blue and in the Castle it's a new job position at the court.

In this train of thought, Kafka might be trying to say that from the moment an individual becomes bound to a given institution, he turns into the architect of his own damnation, since institutions are impersonal, cold, and always avid to reap more benefits from the subjects that conform them. Samsa suddenly turned into a vermin, but from the perspective of the institution that exists through his fatigue, he might as well had always been one. So his transformation might symbolize the sudden awareness of his own opression. He decides to end his family's restraint over him by becoming a pest for them, that is, procuring his own death through inactivity.

The pressures of an industrialized world forced his existence into that of a "man" whose sole purpose is to make money for other people, collect his meager share, and spend it on his family.

Modern man's existence is that of a meaningless insect.

>guy works his ass off for his family
>gets sick
>can't work anymore
>family has to care for him
>turns out they always just saw him as an ATM machine
>they start hating him
>he gets abandoned and abused

Pretty straight forward story. The whole bug thing is just so you can emphasize with the main character without your own bigotries and preconceptions getting in the way.

>lit is so bad at understanding such a short story
Not sure if it's because you're mostly Americans or you're just incompetent.

Enlighten us oh great frogposter

If you read the Letter to the Father you start to see many parallels. Kafka repeatedly compares himself to vermin in comparison to his father. When he was child he literally feared that his father would squish him like a cockroach. I think the Metamorphosis is a representation of that fear and feeling (the father kills him in the Metamorphosis.)

this shows that it is always dangerous to seek an interpretation of a book without reading the other work of the author nor reading his biography

>he doesn't know Kafka evades a fixed interpretation
And that's how come he's considered to be so great. Now actually read something.

What makes you think the father kills him? Protip: The father doesn't kill Gregor

>a picture of the vermin
REEEEEEEEEEEEE Kafka did not want there to be any visual representation of the vermin, because it's not the physical aspect of the vermin that's important, it's the reactions. Kafka sometimes invokes insect imagery but never gives the complete picture, which is why the Metamorphosis is essentially literary

>which forces his family to angrily switch roles
They don't switch roles. This is an interpretation you might make if you only read a synopsis or the first 3 pages or something.

>It has nothing to do with "society". It's purely Kafka's anxiety with the roles within a family brought into a humorous way on paper.
The first people to put pressure on him are the building's super and his boss. So not even first 3 pages. Wow.

>he tries to justify his shitty understanding by labeling something with such ridiculous nonsense
Kafka had a clear idea in his mind when he wrote the short story, interpreting it in the same way is what would make you a great mind.

>Kafka had a clear idea in his mind
He developed this particular style, but that particular style is all about lack of clarity.

>the author doesn't explain every little thing in detail like John Green does
>I can't understand it, thus it's meaning is undefined
The book was very clear from beginning to the end to me, maybe it's because I have read it in German and the English translation just sucks really hard (Just looking how they translated Verwandlung into Metamorphosis gives me a headache).

theyll never understand famalam

>The book was very clear from beginning to the end to me, maybe it's because I have read it in German
What is bullshit? Kafka is less clear in German.

Maybe if you're not a native

Uh huh.

I'm Austrian myself and Kafka is an easy read

fawk yea John Green fhawkin ruless!!
tss tss

Nice analysis, but this interpretation is just as valid as any other posited here.

You do your ideas a disservice to open up with, "Wrong."

It's not whether he's an easy read, it's whether he's straightforward to interpret, and he isn't. There simply is no one stable interpretation in any of his stories, but this is also something we often find in fairy tales, legends, and even Biblical stories. The writing has to gain clarity, at least in translation to English, because there isn't an equivalent way of being vague in a lot of instances to the German so translators have to decide on how to specify the meaning.

To be frank, that guy's interpretation is quite a way more wrong than the other's. There's a back and forth between Gregor being trapped by his familial commitments and everyone, even himself, being trapped by him becoming the provider/head of the household and so on for sure, but that's really not a reversal of roles. He's p much going "Gregor lost his job, and so everyone else got jobs": and what an interpretation we have there!

That is not to say I don't enjoy seeing pseuds on here shit on others and try to be deep or w/e and then fail. But holy shit let's not pander to the fucking idiots.

It means Samsa becomes a t*rk

It's also about hindrance. Once Gregor finally died, the daughter "stretched her young body."

Metaphor for Ottoman conquest

Tbh, all the posts are probably right. I didn't think I would get so many (you)s. I read Kafka when I was 16 only one time over and I was half shit-posting half trying to remember the book at the same time and providing analysis.

My real opinion is Kafka was so good that his true meanings are beautifully nebulous, and it's more important that so many people can have so many different interpretations.