embedded in poor Gregor’s beetle flesh.
PART THREE
Scene I: ”The serious injury done to Gregor, which disabled him for more than a
month—the apple went on sticking in his body as a visible reminder, since no one
ventured to remove it—seemed to have made even his father recollect that Gregor was a
member of the family, despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not
to be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty required the suppression of
disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but patience.” The door theme is taken up
again since now, in the evening, the door leading from Gregor’s darkened room to the
lighted living room is left open. This is a subtle situation. In the previous scene father and
mother had reached their highest point of energy, he in his resplendent uniform pitching
those little red bombs, emblems of fruitfulness and manliness; and she, the mother,
actually moving furniture despite her frail breathing tubes. But after that peak there is a
fall, a weakening. It would almost seem that the father himself is on the point of
disintegrating and becoming a feeble beetle. Through the opened door a curious current
seems to pass. Gregor’s beetle illness is catching, his father seems to have caught it, the
weakness, the drabness, the dirt. “Soon after supper his father would fall asleep in his
armchair; his mother and sister would admonish each other to be silent; his mother,
bending low over the lamp, stitched at fine sewing for an underwear firm; his sister. who
had taken a job as a salesgirl, was learning shorthand and French in the evenings on the
chance of bettering herself. Sometimes his father woke up, and as if quite unaware that he
had been sleeping said to the mother: ‘What a lot of sewing you’re doing today!’ and at
once fell asleep again, while the women exchanged a tired smile.
“With a kind of mulishness his father persisted in keeping his uniform on even in the
house; his dressing gown hung, uselessly on its peg and he slept fully dressed where he
sat, as if he were ready for service at any moment and even here only at the beck and call
of his superior. As a result, his uniform, which was not brand new to start with, began to
look dirty, despite all the loving care of the mother and sister to keep it clean, and Gregor
often spent whole evenings gazing at the many greasy spots on the garment, gleaming
with gold buttons always in a high state of polish, in which the old man sat sleeping in
extreme discomfort and yet quite peacefully.” The father always refused to go to bed
when the time had arrived, despite every inducement offered by the mother and sister,
until finally the two women would hoist him up by his armpits from the chair, “And
leaning on the two of them he would heave himself up, with difficulty, as if he were a
great burden to himself, suffer them to lead him as far as the door and then wave them off
and go on alone, while the mother abandoned her needlework and the sister her pen in
order to run after him and help him farther.” The father’s uniform comes close to
resembling that of a big but somewhat tarnished scarab. His tired overworked family
must get him from one room to another and to bed.
Scene II: The disintegration of the Samsa family continues. They dismiss the servant
girl and engage a still cheaper charwoman, a gigantic bony creature who comes in to do
the rough work. You must remember that in Prague, 1912, it was much more difficult to
clean and cook than in Ithaca, 1954. They have to sell various family ornaments. “But
what they lamented most was the fact that they could not leave the flat which was much
too big for their present circumstances because they could not think of any way to shift
Gregor. Yet Gregor saw well enough that consideration for him was not the main
difficulty preventing the removal, for they could have easily shifted him in some suitable
box with a few air holes in it; what really kept them from moving into another flat was