despair, when the whole room seemed to be reeling around him, fell down on to the
middle of the big table.” There is a change in the respective position of the various
members of the family. Mother (on the couch) and sister are in the middle room; Gregor
is in the corner in the left room. And presently his father comes home and enters the
living room. “And so Gregor fled to the door of his own room and crouched against it, to
let his father see as soon as he came in from the hall that his son had the good intention of
getting back into his own room immediately and that it was not necessary to drive him
there, but that if only the door were opened he would disappear at once.”
Scene X: The apple-pelting scene comes now. Gregor’s father has changed and is now at
the summit of his power. Instead of the man who used to lie wearily sunk in bed and
could scarcely wave an arm in greeting and when he went out shuffled along laboriously
with a crook-handled stick, “Now he was standing there in fine shape; dressed in a smart
blue uniform with gold buttons, such as bank messengers wear; his strong double chin
bulged over the stiff high collar of his jacket; from under his bushy eyebrows his black
eyes darted fresh and penetrating glances; his onetime tangled white hair had been
combed flat on either side of a shining and carefully exact parting. He pitched his cap,
which bore a gold monogram, probably the badge of some bank, in a wide sweep across
the whole room on to a sofa and with the tail-ends of his jacket thrown back, his hands in
his trouser pockets, advanced with a grim visage towards Gregor. Likely enough he did
not himself know what he meant to do; at any rate he lifted his feet uncommonly high
and Gregor was dumbfounded at the enormous size of his shoe soles.”
As usual, Gregor is tremendously interested in the movement of human legs, big thick
human feet, so different from his own flimmering appendages. We have a repetition of
the slow motion theme (The chief clerk, backing and shuffling, had retreated in slow
motion.) Now father and son slowly circle the room: indeed, the whole operation hardly
looked like pursuit it was carried out so slowly. And then his father starts to bombard
Gregor with the only missiles that the living-dining room could provide—apples, small
red apples—and Gregor is driven back into the middle room, back to the heart of his
beetlehood. “An apple thrown without much force grazed Gregor’s back and glanced off
harmlessly. But another following immediately landed right on his back and sank in;
Gregor wanted to drag himself forward, as if this startling, incredible pain could be left
behind him; but he felt as if nailed to the spot and flattened himself out in a complete
derangement of all his senses. With his last conscious look he saw the door of his room
being torn open and his mother rushing out ahead of his screaming sister, in her
underbodice, for her daughter had loosened her clothing to ler her breathe more freely
and recover from her swoon; he saw his mother rushing towards his father, leaving one
after another behind her on the floor her loosened petticoats, stumbling over her
petticoats straight to his father and embracing him, in complete union with him—but here
Gregor’s sight began to fail—with her hands clasped round his father’s neck as she
begged for her son’s life.”
This is the end of part two. Let us sum up the situation. The sister has become frankly
antagonistic to her brother. She may have loved him once, but now she regards him with
disgust and anger. In Mrs. Samsa asthma and emotion struggle. She is a rather
mechanical mother, with some mechanical mother love for her son, but we shall soon see
that she, too, is ready to give him up. The father, as already remarked, has reached a
certain summit of impressive strength and brutality. From the very first he had been eager
to hurt physically his helpless son, and now the apple he has thrown has become