Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a giant insect. The story is usually read as surrealism. It is also a very literal account of what happens to a person who can no longer work. Before the transformation, Gregor was the family's sole income, travelling for a hateful job, supporting parents and sister. After the transformation, he is a burden. His family's love for him is revealed to have been inseparable from his economic function. The horror of The Metamorphosis is not the insect. It is the family.
Remove Gregor's function and watch the family's relationship structure collapse. The connections don't break dramatically — they erode. Each day he becomes less present in their plans, then in their conversations, then in their awareness. Kafka knew: we are loved for what we do far more than we admit.
The first sentence of The Metamorphosis is among the most famous in literature: 'As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.' Kafka offers no explanation. There is no prior curse, no supernatural machinery, no backstory. Gregor is an insect. The story moves immediately to the practical: he is late for work. His manager comes to the door. The family is worried. Not about what happened to Gregor. About the mortgage.
The insect as a person who cannot work
What the transformation makes literal is something Kafka observed in ordinary life: that a person who can no longer be economically useful is, in the eyes of those who depend on them, something other than a full human being. Before the transformation, Gregor worked a hateful job travelling for a fabric company to pay off his parents' debt. After, he is a burden. The family's affection for him was always partly an affection for his function. The transformation simply makes the dependency visible.
He thought back on his family with tenderness and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's. — Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
The horror of the family
The true horror of The Metamorphosis is not Gregor's condition. It is his family's adaptation to it. The father becomes violent. The mother becomes incapacitated by horror. The sister, initially Gregor's advocate, gradually shifts until she is the one who declares that Gregor must go — that they must get rid of the idea that it is Gregor. The transformation of Gregor is external and strange. The transformation of the family is internal and completely recognisable.
Kafka was himself a dutiful son in a family that did not understand his writing, working in insurance, maintaining the appearance of functionality while feeling, he wrote in his diary, like something that should not exist. The Metamorphosis is not autobiographical, exactly. But the feeling of being transformed into something unwanted, without having done anything to cause it, is Kafka's most persistent subject.
On work and identity
The question The Metamorphosis asks is: what are you, when you are not useful? The answer the family provides is: something we do not know how to love anymore. This is a culturally specific answer — a modern, capitalist answer — but it is also a very human one. Identity is partly constituted by function. When the function is removed, what remains is contested. Gregor's tragedy is that the question is answered by others before he can answer it himself.