I Get Gregor: On Kafka's Metamorphosis and Humanity

 At the beginning of Franz Kafka's 1915 novella, The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up fundamentally, physically changed. His body is no longer his (indeed, he no longer appears human).  He is a bug, "vermin." 

“What’s happened to me?” he wonders.  "It wasn't a dream." 

He struggles to get out of bed, registering that something is terribly amiss but also recognizing: 1) he needs to get out of bed because 2) he must make it to work because 3) his boss is a tyrant and 4) his family relies on his income.  

He is, as my class observed last week, in denial. 

They are right.  

But bless them, my class.  

They think Gregor is a bug.  

Although some are starting to see him as a metaphor or symbol of disability, many do not (yet) have the life experience to see as anything other than a spectacle or "monster."  The fact that he was human in a body as well as soul does not carry over to their assessment of him in the story. 

I--well, I have a different perspective.  It is one thing to read about Gregor as a bug who appears to readers objectified and uncommented on through Kafak's third-person narrator.  It is another to be Gregor. As Fran Wilde writes in her essay about disability representations in the media: "when the experience shifts to second person---trading a Gregor...for a 'you'--the horror can be doubled. You are more than witness to the event. You are part of the show." 

The "you" becomes "I." 

And the "I" sees and feels differently.  

I get Gregor differently after my overachiever's combo of COVID + steroid allergies + diabetes + Bell's Palsy left me decimated, destroyed, and muddling through surreal, distorted landscape.

I see how deftly Kafka portrays Gregor navigating a new body and hanged relationships, while clinging (as best he can with his pincers and multiple legs and strong jaw) to routine for a sense of normalcy and control.

I see Kakfa taking a pulse of a modernizing work world that measures worth in terms of productivity and employment long before Covid and before Zoom, Teams, and Skype let people wake sick and vomit their way through back-to-back meetings. 

I feel The Metamorphosis differently, and more deeply because for days I woke up with this on my mind: "What is happening to me?...this isn't a dream"? 

I get Gregor--he is not a bug.  He is human. And his world? Its not the absurd creation of a long-dead author.  It is ours.