The themes of alienation, isolation, lack of recognition, and meaningless of existence have different emphases in works of Kafka, Mann, and Camus. However, what they share is a strong sense of a failure to belong to the world in which they find themselves. The profoundly introspective explorations by Kafka, Mann, and Camus suggest to some degree a working-out of the notion that solutions to major problems of existence lie within the Self. But a self that cannot find a suitable place in its own environment is doomed.
In Kafka's "Metamorphosis," the failure is principally one of perception, not of the physical reality in which Gregor finds himself but rather of his emotional environment. Gregor is both isolated from and subject to the whim of his external universe. He is at pains to get to work on time, to please his family. When he has turned into a beetle, his alienation arises from the disgust of others. But in fact he has been isolated all along, and the metamorphosis is just the manifestation of his inner life.
Gregor has never asserted or more exactly inserted his selfhood into his experience of the world. He does not experience injustice at being imprisoned by his family, after the transformation any more than he objected to being imprisoned as the family breadwinner before it. For example, he "of course" will not ask his father directly the status of assets of the failed family business. Instead, Gregor "set to work with unusual ardor and almost overnight had beocme a commercial traveler instead of a little clerk, with of course much greater chances of earning money . . . . [L]ater on Gregor had earned so much money that he was albe to meet the expenses of the whole household and did so. They had simply got used to it . . . the money was gratefully accepted and gladly given, but there was no special uprush of warm feeling" (Kafka 870). Gregor provides, enables, facilitates others' lives, but there is no return of the fav...