to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never experienced before.
*Nabokov’s notes in his annotated copy: “A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes—a
beetle with human eyes.” About the passage in general he has the note: “In the original German there is a
wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He his half-awake—he realizes his
plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human
memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet.”
“Ach Gott, he thought, what an exhausting job I’ve picked on! Traveling about day in,
day out. Many more anxieties on the road than in the office, the plague of worrying
about train connections, the bad and irregular meals, casual acquaintances never to be
seen again, never to become intimate friends. The hell with it all! He felt a slight itching
on the skin of his belly; slowly pushed himself on his back nearer the top of the bed so
that he could lift his head more easily; identified the itching place which was covered
with small white dots the nature of which he could not understand and tried to touch it
with a leg, but drew the leg back immediately, for the contact made a cold shiver run
through him.”
Now what exactly is the “vermin” into which poor Gregor, the seedy commercial
traveler, is so suddenly transformed? It obviously belongs to the branch of “jointed
leggers” (Arthropoda), to which insects, and spiders, and centipedes, and crustaceans
belong. If the “numerous little legs” mentioned in the beginning mean more than six
legs, then Gregor would not be an insect from a zoological point of view. But I suggest
that a man awakening on his back and finding he has as many as six legs vibrating in the
air might feel that six was sufficient to be called numerous. We shall therefore assume
that Gregor has six legs, that he is an insect.
Next question: what insect? Commentators say cockroach, which of course does not
make sense. A cockroach is an insect that is flat in shape with large legs, and Gregor is
anything but flat: he is convex on both sides, belly and back, and his legs are small. He
approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart
from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded
back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little wings that can
be expanded and then may carry the beetle for miles and miles in a blundering flight.
Curiously enough, Gregor the beetle never found out that he had wings under the hard
covering of his back. (This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your
lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings.) Further,
he has strong mandibles. He uses these organs to turn the key in a lock while standing
erect on his hind legs, on his third pair of legs (a strong little pair), and this gives us the
length of his body, which is about three feet long. In the course of the story he gets
gradually accustomed to using his new appendages—his feet, his feelers. This brown,
convex, dog-sized beetle is very broad. I should imagine him to look like this:
In the original German text the old charwoman calls him Mistkäfer, a “dung beetle.” It is
obvious that the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly. He is not,
technically, a dung beetle. He is merely a big beetle. (I must add that neither Gregor nor
Kafka saw that beetle any too clearly.)
Let us look closer at the transformation. The change, though shocking and striking, is
not quite so odd as might be assumed at first glance. A commonsensical commentator
(Paul L. Landsberg in The Kafka Problem [1946], ed. Angel Flores) notes that “When we
go to bed in unfamiliar surroundings, we are apt to have a moment of bewilderment upon
awakening, a sudden sense of unreality, and this experience must occur over and over