”Gimme that hammer. I think I’ll have to knock her again.” But the girl gives her mate a
knife instead and he stabs the girl’s mother many, many times, to death—under the
impression, probably, that this all is a comic strip: you hit a person, the person sees lots of
stars and exclamation marks but revives by and by, in the next installment. Physical life
however has no next installment, and soon boy and girl have to do something with dead
mother. “Oh, plaster of paris, it will dissolve her completely!” Of course, it will—
marvelous idea—place body in bathtub, cover with plaster, and that’s all. Meanwhile,
with mother under the plaster (which does not work—wrong plaster, perhaps) boy and
girl throw several beer parties. What fun! Lovely canned music, and lovely canned beer.
“But you can’t go, fellas, to the bathroom. The bathroom is a mess.”
I’m trying to show you that in so-called real life we find sometimes a great resemblance
to the situation in Kafka’s fantastic story. Mark the curious mentality of the morons in
Kafka who enjoy their evening paper despite the fantastic horror in the middle of their
apartment. ” ‘What a quiet life our family has been leading,’ said Gregor to himself, and
as he sat there motionless staring into the darkness he felt great pride in the fact that he
had been able to provide such a life for his parents and sister in such a fine flat.” The
room is lofty and empty and the beetle begins to dominate the man. The high room “in
which he had to lie flat on the floor filled him with an apprehension he could not account
for, since it had been his very own room for the past five years—and with a halfunconscious
action, not without a slight feeling of shame, he scuttled under the couch,
where he felt comfortable at once, although his back was a little cramped and he could
not lift his head up, and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get the whole
of it under the couch.”
Scene III: Gregor’s sister brings a selection of foods. She removes the basin of milk, not
by means of her bare hands but with a cloth, for it has been touched by the disgusting
monster. However, she is a clever little creature, that sister, and brings a whole
selection—rotten vegetables, old cheese, bones glazed with dead white sauce—and
Gregor whizzed towards this feast. “One after another and with tears of satisfaction in his
eyes he quickly devoured the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the fresh food, on the
other hand, had no charms for him, he could not even stand the smell of it and actually
dragged away to some little distance the things he could eat.” The sister turns the key in
the lock slowly as a warning that he should retreat, and she comes and cleans up while
Gregor, full of food, tries to hide under the couch.
Scene IV: Grete, the sister, takes on a new importance. It is she who feeds the beetle; she
alone enters the beetle’s lair, sighing and with an occasional appeal to the saints—it is
such a Christian family. In a wonderful passage the cook goes down on her knees to Mrs.
Samsa and begs to leave. With tears in her eyes she thanks the Samsas for allowing her to
go—as if she were a liberated slave—and without any prompting she swears a solemn
oath that she will never say a single word to anyone about what is happening in the
Samsa household. “Gregor was fed, once in the early morning while his parents and the
servant girl were still asleep, and a second time after they had all had their midday dinner,
for then his parents took a short nap and the servant girl could be sent out on some errand
or other by his sister. Not that they would have wanted him to starve, of course, but
perhaps they could not have borne to know more about his feeding than from hearsay,
perhaps too his sister wanted to spare them such little anxieties wherever possible, since
they had quite enough to bear as it was.”