thinking of opening the door, and felt thankful for the prudent habit he had acquired in
traveling of locking all doors during the night, even at home.”
Scene III: The getting out of bed ordeal in which man plans but beetle acts. Gregor still
thinks of his body in human terms, but now a human’s lower part is a beetle’s hind part, a
human’s upper part is a beetle’s fore part. A man on all fours seems to him to correspond
to a beetle on all sixes. He does not quite yet understand this and will persistently try to
stand up on his third pair of legs. “He thought that he might get out of bed with the lower
part of his body first, but this lower part, which he had not yet seen and of which he could
form no clear conception, proved too difficult to move; it was all so slow; and when at
last almost savagely he gathered his forces together and thrust out recklessly, he had
miscalculated the direction and bumped heavily against the lower end of the bed, and the
burning pain he felt taught him that it was the lower part of his body that probably for the
time being was the most sensitive . . . But then he said to himself: ‘Before it strikes a
quarter past seven I must be quite out of this bed, without fail. Anyhow, by that time
someone will have come from the office to ask what is the matter with me, since it opens
before seven.’ And he set himself to rocking his whole body at once in a regular series of
jolts, with the idea of swinging it out of the bed. If he tipped himself out in that way he
could keep his head from injury by lifting it at an acute angle when he fell. His back
seemed to be hard and was not likely to suffer from a fall on the carpet. His biggest worry
was the loud crash he would not be able to help making, which would probably cause
anxiety, if not terror, behind all the doors. Still, he must take the risk… Well, ignoring
the fact that the doors were all locked, ought he really to call for help? In spite of his
misery he could not suppress a smile at the very idea of it.”
Scene IV: He is still struggling when the family theme, or the theme of the many doors,
takes over again, and in the course of this scene he falls out of bed at last, with a dull
thud. The conversation is a little on the lines of a Greek chorus. From Gregor’s office the
head clerk has been sent to see why he has not yet turned up at the station. This grim
speed in checking a remiss employee has all the qualities of a bad dream. The speaking
through doors, as in the second scene, is now repeated. Note the sequence: the chief clerk
talks to Gregor from the living room on the left; Gregor’s sister, Grete, talks to her
brother from the room on the right; the mother and father join the chief clerk in the living
room. Gregor can still speak, but his voice becomes more and more indistinct, and soon
his speech cannot he understood. (In Finnegans Wake, written twenty years later by
James Joyce, two washerwomen talking across a river are gradually changed into a stout
elm and a stone.) Gregor does not understand why his sister in the right-hand room did
not join the others. “She was probably newly out of bed and hadn’t even begun to put on
her clothes yet. Well, why was she crying? Because he wouldn’t get up and let the chief
clerk in, because he was in danger of losing his job, and because the boss would begin
dunning his parents again for the old debts?” Poor Gregor is so accustomed to be just an
instrument to be used by his family that the question of pity does not arise: he does not
even hope that Grete might be sorry for him. Mother and sister call to each other from the
doors across Gregor’s room. The sister and servant are dispatched for a doctor and a