Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis uses a fantastic situation to create an allegory about the meaning of humanness and about the relationship of the individual to the world in which he lives. That relationship is involved here as the ties to that world are broken. Gregor Samsa awakens to find that he has been changed into a huge vermin. The only contact he has with the world in which he lived the night before is through the family members who can be heard moving around the house and who react to Gregor's change in various ways. Underlying this story is the sense that Gregor is being punished for some unstated crime and that the universe has taken this means of inflicting that punishment. As with certain other Kafka heroes, Gregor seems to have no idea what crime he committed and in many ways does not seem surprised that he is being punished in spite of that fact. Man's position in this world is always to be the transgressor against some higher power he or she never really knows or understands.

Gregor has gone from being human to being non-human. Gregor does not rail against his fate but rather seems to accept it as his due, perhaps also accepting the idea that punishment is his due simply because he was a human being. The regularity of Gregor's life to this moment is indicated by his thoughts concerning how he must be out of bed at a certain time in order to get to work as he has done every day of his life. As he lays in bed now, Gregor seems to sense a change not onl

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e meets, as if they sang rather than speaking. The woman he meets at the station points him in the direction of Matryona's House, as if that direction leads to what he really seeks--an untouched region, a truly rural area that represents the true soul of Russia, not yet damaged beyond repair. Beyond this region is an area with old-fashioned villages with old-fashioned names. This is all depicted as if it would be soothing, for that is what the man believes and what Solzhenitsyn wants to present as the magic of the place. Solzhenitsyn uses the railroad and the railroad accident in this novel as a way of commenting on the changes taking place in Russia at the time, and through this he shows the real disfiguration of life as Matryona lies in pieces because of the train. While the idyllic scene is thought to be soothing to the narrator, and while that would be the case if it were not for the way that scene is being scarred by its encounter with the modern world of bureaucracy, from the beginning of the novel there is a pervasive sense of doom that shapes the actions depicted and the interaction of the characters. For both the narrator and Solzhenitsyn, the world of rural Russia comes through as a form of memory, as if that

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