rather their own complete hopelessness and the belief that they had been singled out for a
misfortune such as had never happened to any of their relations or acquaintances.” The
family is completely egotistic and has no more strength left after fulfilling its daily
obligations.
Scene III: A last flash of human recollections comes to Gregor’s mind, prompted by the
still living urge in him to help his family. He even remembers vague sweethearts, “but
instead of helping him and his family they were one and all unapproachable and he was
glad when they vanished.” This scene is mainly devoted to Grete, who is now clearly the
villain of the piece. “His sister no longer took thought to bring him what might especially
please him, but in the morning and at noon before she went to business hurriedly pushed
into his room with her foot any food that was available, and in the evening cleared it out
again with one sweep of the broom, heedless of whether it had been merely tasted, or—as
most frequently happened—left untouched. The cleaning of his room, which she now did
always in the evenings, could not have been more hastily done. Streaks of dirt stretched
along the walls, here and there lay balls of dust and filth. At first Gregor used to station
himself in some particularly filthy corner when his sister arrived in order to reproach her
with it, so to speak. But he could have sat there for weeks without getting her to make
any improvement; she could see the dirt as well as he did, but she had simply made up
her mind to leave it alone. And yet, with a touchiness that was new to her, which seemed
anyhow to have infected the whole family, she jealously guarded her claim to be the sole
caretaker of Gregor’s room.” Once when his mother had given the room a thorough
cleaning with several buckets of water—the dampness upset Gregor—a grotesque family
row ensues. The sister bursts into a storm of weeping while her parents look on in
helpless amazement; “then they too began to go into action; the father reproached the
mother on his right for not having left the cleaning of Gregor’s room to his sister;
shrieked at the sister on his left that never again was she to be allowed to clean Gregor’s
room; while the mother tried to pull the father into his bedroom, since he was beyond
himself with agitation; the sister, shaken with sobs, then beat upon the table with her
small fists; and Gregor hissed loudly with rage because not one of them thought of
shutting the door to spare him such a spectacle and so much noise.”
Scene IV: A curious relationship is established between Gregor and the bony charwoman
who is rather amused by him, not frightened at all, and in fact she rather likes him.
“Come along, then, you old dung beetle,” she says. And it is raining outside, the first sign
of spring perhaps.
Scene V: The lodgers arrive, the three bearded boarders, with a passion for order. These
are mechanical beings; their beards are masks of respectability but actually they are
shoddy scoundrels, these serious- looking gentlemen. In this scene a great change comes
over the apartment. The boarders take the parents’ bedroom on the far left of the flat,
beyond the living room. The parents move across to the sister’s room on the right of
Gregor’s room, and Grete has to sleep in the living room but has now no room of her own
since the lodgers take their meals in the living room and spend their evenings there.
Moreover, the three bearded boarders have brought into this furnished flat some furniture
of their own. They have a fiendish love for superficial tidiness, and all the odds and ends
which they do not need go into Gregor’s room. This is exactly the opposite to what had
been happening in the furniture scene of part two, scene 7, where there had been an
attempt to move everything out of Gregor’s room. Then we had the ebb of the furniture,
now the return flow, the jetsam washed back, all kinds of junk pouring in; and curiously