disgust at the awful smell in his den. Neither does she conceal her feelings when she
actually sees him. One day, about a month after Gregor’s metamorphosis, “when there
was surely no reason for her to be still startled at his appearance, she came a little earlier
than usual and found him gazing out of the window, quite motionless, and thus well
placed to look like a bogey. . . She jumped back as if in alarm and banged the door shut; a
stranger might well have thought that he had been lying in wait for her there meaning to
bite her. Of course he hid himself under the couch at once, but he had to wait until
midday before she came again, and she seemed more ill at ease than usual.” These things
hurt, and nobody understood how they hurt. In an exquisite display of feeling, in order to
spare her the repulsive sight of him, Gregor one day “carried a sheet on his back to the
couch—it cost him four hours’ labor—and arranged it there in such a way as to hide him
completely, so that even if she were to bend down she could not see him. . . Gregor even
fancied that he caught a thankful glance from her eye when he lifted the sheet carefully a
very little with his head to see how she was taking the new arrangement.”
It should be noted how kind, how good our poor little monster is. His beetlehood, while
distorting and degrading his body, seems to bring out in him all his human sweetness. His
utter unselfishness, his constant preoccupation with the needs of others—this, against the
backdrop of his hideous plight comes out in strong relief. Kafka’s art consists in
accumulating on the one hand, Gregor’s insect features, all the sad detail of his insect
disguise, and on the other hand, in keeping vivid and limpid before the reader’s eyes
Gregor’s sweet and subtle human nature.
Scene VII: Here occurs the furniture-moving scene. Two months have passed. Up to now
only his sister has been visiting him; but, Gregor says to himself, my sister is only a
child; she has taken on herself the job of caring for me merely out of childish
thoughtlessness. My mother should understand the situation better. So here in the seventh
scene the mother, asthmatic, feeble, and muddleheaded, will enter his room for the first
time. Kafka prepares the scene carefully. For recreation Gregor had formed the habit of
walking on the walls and ceiling. He is at the height of the meagre bliss his beetlehood
can produce. “His sister at once remarked the new distraction Gregor had found for
himself—he left traces behind him of the sticky stuff on his soles wherever he crawled—
and she got the idea in her head of giving him as wide a field as possible to crawl in and
of removing the pieces of furniture that hindered him, above all the chest of drawers and
the writing desk.” Thus the mother is brought in to help move the furniture. She comes to
his door with exclamations of joyful eagerness to see her son, an incongruous and
automatic reaction that is replaced by a certain hush when she enters the mysterious
chamber. “Gregor’s sister, of course, went in first, to see that everything was in order
before letting his mother enter. In great haste Gregor pulled the sheet lower and rucked it
more in folds so that it really looked as if it had been thrown accidentally over the couch.
And this time he did not peer out from under it; he renounced the pleasure of seeing his
mother on this occasion and was only glad that she had come at all. “Come in, he’s out of
sight,” said his sister, obviously leading her mother in by the hand.
The women struggle to move the heavy furniture until his mother voices a certain human
thought, naive but kind, feeble but not devoid of feeling, when she says: ‘Doesn’t it look
as if we were showing him, by taking away his furniture, that we have given up hope of
his ever getting better and are just leaving him coldly to himself? I think it would be best