Kafka Citations- The Nature of the metamorphoses in "The Metamorphosis"

In Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis", the protagonist's great transformation, often the pivotal moment in a work of fiction, gets plopped unceremoniously on our lap in the story's first sentence. In other words, it begins with what should be its climax. "The Metamorphosis" opens with the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, discovering that he has turned into a giant cockroach. Surprisingly, Gregor’s bizarre new state is not the central transformation in the novel. Gregor’s love and devotion towards his family remain unchanged throughout the story, the only constant left in his rapidly deteriorating life. As his physical needs and abilities shift from human to animal, it is his family who forces him to adapt to his new identity: they remove the furniture from his room, begin feeding him leftovers, and gradually help strip away everything that had identified him as a human being. It is no surprise, then, that they’re able to exclude Gregor from their lives, and ultimately cause his death. By the end of the story, Gregor’s parents and sister have themselves metamorphosed.

Gregor's metamorphosis calls into question all the assumptions of our daily lives: that success and appearance and social position matter; that a productive life was characterized by a steadily improving standard of living and a socially acceptable appearance. These considerations produce even further questions: if we once appeared socially acceptable and now have ceased to do so, are we still in fact ourselves? Was the socially acceptable persona in fact ourselves, or is there more essential selfness in the being we have now become? Or have we, in fact, been nobody in the first place, and are we nobody still? "The Metamorphosis" is a story about alienation. Gregor's life is dictated by his dead-end job and family responsibilities to the extent that even when he travels to different towns, he prefers to stay in his hotel room studying train timetables rather than experience what the new location has to offer. When Gregor wakes up as an insect, his essential identity has not changed. Curiously, his condition does not arouse a sense of surprise or incredulity in the eyes of his family, who merely despise it as an indication of impending burden. Gregor's earlier sentiment is reciprocated when his family begins locking and bolting the door shut behind him in his room.