This was a manifestation of his fears, paranoias, and anxieties he felt while he lived his life. Maybe this was part of his dream journal turned into a story. Or maybe this was all just an awful nightmare Kafka felt he was living while he was lying in bed dying. “Analysis of ‘The Metamorphosis’ by Franz Kafka” He quickly lost contact with reality it seems to me.ĭon't use plagiarized sources. He was experiencing despair, loneliness, isolation, blindness, and not being able to communicate his needs or wants to his family any longer.
Meaning he split from reality and went into his latent level of consciousness. Maybe with the sleep deprivation and starvation some schizoid behaviors showed up in his writing. Maybe the father didn’t throw apples at him but words that pelted him, and some of them stuck with him as he laid waiting on death in the room where they locked him up and slowly seemed to forget about him. Since Kafka wrote this while he himself was lying on his death bed, completely sleep deprived, and starving from his throat being closed off he started going a little crazy letting his unconscious mind take over with all kinds of wildness like becoming the cockroach. Then his family turned it around on him and locked him in his room when he got ill. Gregor seemed to want to alienate himself daily anyway from his family by locking himself in his room when he was home. He did everything for his family, and the second he gets ill, everyone shuts him out of their life completely except for Grete at first. He had felt like a pest, a nuisance, and a waste of space and life pretty much by that point in his life.
This I feel takes place when Gregor wakes up and sees himself as a roach. There are arguments that your unconscious mind can take over your reality and warp it. He had no friends, no girlfriend, no life. The family had no respect for what he gave up each day going to work to keep them all up. In Gregor’s view his family already saw him as a cockroach with how they treated him even while he was the only one working and providing for them. Basically, I believe that The Metamorphosis is about the fight between your consciousness and your unconscious mind.