The most depressing thing I've ever read. (The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka)

Name: Bryn Pearson

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Product:	The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
Date:	14/09/01 (443 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: a very powerful and unsettling tale

Disadvantages: very depressing.

I first read this text back when I was all of about seventeen, and I wept bitterly for the futility of it, for the anguish of the main character and for the utter pointlessness of existence. When you are an angst ridden teenager, it is hard to look beyond the agony in this short tale and to see anything else that is hapening. Looking at it now, I see that this book has a lot more to offer.

The tale is simple, if strange. Gregor is a hard working young man who supports his two parents and his little sister. His father does not work, and without Gregor, the family would not survive. One morning, Gregor wakes to find that he has turned into a beetle. He can no longer work, or even leave the house. The provider has become the invalid and he must depend upon his family for support. You might expect that after years of being kept by Gregor, his family might find the energy to care for him, but in their fear, they respond with anger, blaming him for this change, as though he had intentionally chosen it. They are ashamed of his condition. Unloved, unwanted and uncared for, Gregor gradually decays both spiritually and physically. He slowly withers away until death, after which his family throw his body out. As a result of Gregor's death, his family start to take respionsibility for their own lives, to earn their own money and to support themselves - it is clear that they aren't going to starve.

It is easy enough to read this tale as a metaphor for disability or mental illness. The stigma of Gregor's beetle state is comparable to the attitude s historically tha disabled people have been faced with.

As a study of humanity, this is a fairly bleak tale, and one of the most powerful things I took from it was the sense of obligation to make sure that nothing comparable happens to anyone I know. It is easy to be a fair weather friend, easy to walk away from someone who has suddenly changed and become needy. It is possible to find something po
sitive in this book, with a bit of perserverance.

There is an adaptation of the book for the stage (sorry, cann't for the life of me recall the name of the playwright.) This, I initially felt was an impossible thing to do - how, after all, does one represent the transformation without becoming ludicrous? One cannot have a beetle on the stage without the tale becoming farcical. I have only seen one production, but a sixth form group, who took the following approach. They chose to make Gregor's family Northern, (Yorkshire I think.)this works especially well with Gregor's father. They did not have any sort of beetle costume. Gregor was played by a very talented dancer (female) who wore a tight black top and legging, and who conveyed beetleness through her movements. It was an incredible thing to see and as a result I cannot think of any other way of approaching this text as a stage production.

If you are studying Kafka, I would strongly recomend investing in a copy of Alan Bennett's excellent play "Kafka's Dick" in which the tortoise belonging to a middle class couple wakes up one morning to find that during the night, it has turned into Kafka. This is a wonderfully silly play, littered with insights into the author, and I have to say, when faced with a difficult and depressing text, there's a lot to be said for having something to laugh at.

Kafka himself is an interesting figure, writing from a repressive era, his work is often dark. I would recomend also reading "The Trial" (even more depressing) any of his other short stories, and looking at his diaries - which you can buy. I do like Kafka's work enormously, but find I can only approach it in small doses - it isn't bedtime reading by any stretch of the imagination.

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