The Metamorphosis

“One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug”. This is how the divine Kafka magic starts and I am finally home to my reading days. After discovering the new passion of self induced, nicotine powered solitude, it was a pleasure and quite an easy task to find myself back again to the beautiful world of books. Thanks to those self invited, long lasting spells of non momentary depression which I had acquired and learned to live with recently, ‘The Metamorphosis’ turned out to be a mesmerizing reading experience where I was literally lost in the carefully crafted magical realistic setup. I had to pinch myself to ensure that I still live in the blunted but still a safe, human form. It was my late teens where I first heard about Kafka but the first attempt to read ‘Metamorphosis’ was a miserable failure undoubtedly because of my poor understanding of Real life situations and transformations which an average middle class adult goes through. Magical realism was also something which was not digestible for me in those days where a growing brain of my atheistic teen was always keen on dismissing the supernatural things in an impatient and merciless way to become a perfect rationalist. After years of wasteful existence with out books, I have now finally read this in a kind of sprinting pace. But the regret for not reading this in its original language prevails as I have come to know that it has been lost in translation to a much distinguishable extent when it came to English from German.

“Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop - that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions cannot be duplicated in English, so it is up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text.One such instance of a Kafka translator's quandary is demonstrated in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis.(Wikipedia)”. Metamorphosis is considered to be the best talked about philosophical novella ever written especially on existentialism [Existentialism is a philosophical movement which posits that individuals create the meaning and essence of their lives, as opposed to it being created for them by deities or authorities or defined for them by philosophical or theological doctrines]. As per wiki, “The apparent hopelessness and absurdity that seem to permeate his works are considered emblematic of existentialism”.

In a layman’s angle I could see that, Kafka was literally demonstrating how a person who was the most instrumental being for his entire family and for the individual lives of its members, becomes a burden to them due to a completely unimaginable and miserable accident in his life for none of his faults. The tragic side of this reading experience is the realization of the very fact that each one of us is a ‘Gregor Samsa’ at least in one point of our life time and we will never know when we may transform our self into an ugly derogatory being which the closest people of our life would love to get rid off. The point is as clear as water. A ‘Gregor’ is a ‘Gregor’ as long as he wakes up at the dawn, catches the earliest train, works all the day like a machine, and hits back home with nickels in hand. In short, a Gregor is a Gregor only when he is a Gregor. When he (or for the same reason each one of us) ceases to be being ‘Gregor’, he has to be ready to get thrown off. Idea is quite simple. Every living thing in the world, (human being is not exceptional) struggle for an individual survival with in or out of the robust crust of their relational bonds which he or she is attached with. Gretta has a life to live and the same with Mr and Mrs Samsa. The importance of the lives of these three individuals cannot be belittled or ignored only because of some miserable thing which happens in the life of Gregor though he had been scarifying his own happiness for giving happiness to them.

Metamorphosis is an amazingly matured piece of literature works which one can go through once and live with the thought provoking reminiscences of it's reading experience there after.