The Metamorphosis By Kafka

In one of his seven short talks written for a series of radio broadcasts Maurice Merleau-Ponty, arguing that ‘our era is destined to judge itself not from on high […] but in a certain sense from below’, provides this literary example: ‘Kafka imagines a man who has metamorphosed into a strange insect and who looks at his family through the eyes of such an insect’. By referring to ‘The Metamorphosis’ (and also to ‘Investigations of a dog’ in the following sentence) the French philosopher suggests how Kafka’s choice for an animal point of view is an attempt to describe societies trapped in the carapace of customs which they themselves have adopted. Kafka’s depiction of animality, especially in some short stories, is, in fact, one of the stylistic
I will focus on two of them, ‘The Metamorphosis’ (written in 1912, published three years later) and ‘A Report to an Academy’ (written and published in 1917), because they display complementary characters that both conduct their life in a sort of zone of indiscernibility. Animality means in these stories not just a beastlike condition or a revolting shape. It is rather an indistinguishable state which the two protagonists, Gregor Samsa and Red Peter, shares in different directions. The fist short story is a third-person narration, in which a travelling salesman wakes up to find himself transformed in an ungeheures Ungeziefer, ‘a gigantic insect’. Kafka’s implacable eyes follow Gregor gradually losing all his old human senses, which had articulated the shapes of the world for him, and even the relationship with his family, until he dies of starving, rejected by everyone. The second, instead, is an autobiographical report written by an ape, a chimpanzee, to explain to a learned society his development since he was captured and brought to Europe. He is now a famous star of the variety halls, famous not just as a mimic of human behaviour but also for his ability to read and write, to think rationally, to digest human knowledge; he has acquired what he calls ‘the cultural level of an average European’. Therefore, any reader faces here creatures in transition between two species: Kafka tells the devolution of a
T. A. Hoffmann, included in the latter’s Kreisleriana and entitled ‘Nachricht von einem gebildeten jungen Mann’, which consists mainly of a long letter that a trained ape writes to a young female whom he wants to impress with the account of his acquisition of human culture. But, unlike in Swift’s novel, Kafka’s surrealistic short stories have not satirical intentions. In these two hybrid fictions, the animal is rather represented ‘as a figure of pathos’. Animality is something to escape, whereas humanity is something which is always impossible to understand at all. Gregor will never become definitely a bug or a cockroach. Even if no human sense is left but hearing, he still keeps his emotions: dreams, a few seizures of megalomania, absurd hopes, memories. He is a divided creature, something that oscillates between animal and man and does not have the strength for a complete metamorphosis. After his father’s attack, Gregor suffers terribly from the wound. At the beginning of the third chapter he lives in his room – no longer a man, not yet an animal – as a degraded figure, who pretends to forget that his family secretly wishes to get rid of