From the very beginning of Kafka's most reknowned tale, one is lulled into an unflinching acceptance of Gregor's hellish reality. The perceived normality of Gregor's treatment (even to himself) makes it harder to question. This is similar to what happened after 9/11: the unguarded demonisation of all Muslims as terrorists made such thinking mainstream. (Indeed, in my experience, many didn't even know what a Muslim was before 9/11!) But can people who think this way be excused for being ignorant and scared? Gregor feels sorry for his family, as ‘it was precisely all the uncertainty that was oppressing the others and that excused their behaviour.’[1] But surely such behaviour is not innocent and excusable if it results in the demise of another?
At first, Gregor is not at all self-conscious or pre-occupied with his appearance, he is mainly concerned about the weather and work. His self-perception only changes after seeing other people's reactions to him: rather than feeling normal he feels he has to try to ‘make bearable the unpleasantness he was absolutely compelled to cause them in his present condition.’ There is now no doubt in his mind that he has a ‘condition’, a very inconvenient one at that. His perception of the world also changes, ‘with each passing day his view of things at only a slight distance was becoming increasingly blurry...what he saw from his window was a featureless solitude, in which the grey sky and the grey earth blended inseparably.’ And when his sister removes everything from the room, it is as though the world around him is shutting down bit by bit, until even Gregor himself is deleted. By positioning the reader so that they are with Gregor before the others enter, we are able to see that the psychological transformation inflicted upon Gregor by society is far more consequential than his physical metamorphosis. Similar to Fanon's depiction of being black, Gregor, and perhaps the Muslim too, begins to feel a desperation to shed his treacherous skin.
Gregor’s character also changes as a result of his dehumanization. At first he is very considerate but towards the end he feels indifferent towards everyone, including himself, and goes into the room where his sister is playing the violin. He even has violent intentions, wishing to kidnap his sister and ‘spit at his assailants like a cat’. His family consider this a violation, “it has to go.” But when reading this in the wake of 9/11, I couldn’t shake the (rather contemporary) adage that ‘one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. Like 9/11, Gregor’s transformation throws everything into a state of panic and a world of extremes - good and evil, zealous love and irrational hate, utopian happiness and hysterical grief - which makes any attempt at understanding and integrating impossible.
The sickly sweet and rather surreal ending, depicting the rebirth of the family out of Gregor's ashes, could be used to parody the right wing notion that the suppression and eradication of 'alternative' sectors will bring society together. I don’t think this ending is supposed to feel right or fit with the realism of the rest of the tale, because the idea of self-othering as an acceptable path to social cohesion is unnerving, to say the least.
But Kafka also warns against mere ‘tolerance’, a term we’ve become so accustomed to using, which really just means swallowing one’s repulsion and being patient, ‘only patient’. What is wrong with using the term ‘duty’, or even ‘empathy’, with regards to our global family?
The reader is constantly made to feel that Gregor's is a temporary condition that will go as quickly and randomly as it came. But it is only when he dies that we realise it was actually the beginning of the end for Gregor: ‘he realized that the sight of him was still unbearable for her and would surely remain unbearable for her in the future’. This is how dehumanization happens. Whether it is the sudden enslavement and colonization of the African peoples or the overnight stigmatization of Muslims after 9/11, all are suddenly pushed out of ‘the circle of humanity.’
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