alienation in the metamorphosis essay

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The Metamorphosis: an Analysis of Isolation, Identity, and Symbolism

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A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Metamorphosis’ is a short story (sometimes classed as a novella) by the Czech-born German-language author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It is his best-known shorter work, published in German in 1915, with the first English translation appearing in 1933. ‘The Metamorphosis’ has attracted numerous interpretations, so it might be worth probing this fascinating story more closely.

You can read ‘The Metamorphosis’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Kafka’s story below.

Plot Summary

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. Although he briefly considers this transformation, he quickly turns his thoughts to his work and his need to provide for his parents (he lives with them and his sister) so that they can pay off their debts. He also thinks about how much he hates travelling.

He realises he is already late for work, but hesitates to call in sick because he has never had a day off sick before, and knows this might raise alarm bells. When he responds through the bedroom door after his mother calls to him, he realises that his voice has become different as a result of his metamorphosis into an insect. When his family try to enter his bedroom, they find the door locked, and he refuses to let them in.

Then there’s a knock at the door and it’s the chief clerk for whom Gregor works, wondering where Gregor has got to.

Still Gregor refuses to open the door to his family or to his visitor. The chief clerk is affronted and tells Gregor through the door that his work has not been good enough and his position at the company may not be safe. Gregor seeks to defend himself, and assures the clerk that he will soon return to work. However, because Gregor’s voice has changed so much since his transformation, nobody can understand what he’s saying.

Gregor opens the door and his mother screams when she sees him. He asks the chief clerk to smooth things over at the office for him, explaining his … sudden metamorphosis into an insect.

Later that evening, having swooned and dozed all day, Gregor wakes up at twilight and finds that his sister had brought him milk with some bread in it. Gregor attempts to drink the milk, but finds the taste disgusting, so he leaves it. He climbs under the couch so his family don’t have to look at him, while his sister tries to find him food that he can eat.

Gregor overhears his family talking in the other room, and discovers that, despite their apparent debts, his parents have some money stashed away. He has been going to work to support them when he didn’t have to.

As well as the changes to his voice, Gregor also realises that his vision has got worse since his transformation. He also discovers that he enjoys climbing the walls and the ceiling of his bedroom. To help him, his sister gets rid of the furniture to create more space for him to climb; Gregor’s mother disagrees and is reluctant to throw out all of Gregor’s human possessions, because she still trusts that he will return to his former state one day.

When he comes out of the room, his mother faints and his sister locks him outside. His father arrives and throws apples at him, severely injuring him, because he believes Gregor must have attacked his own mother.

After his brush with death, the family change tack and vow to be more sympathetic towards Gregor, agreeing to leave the door open so he can watch them from outside the room as they talk together. But when three lodgers move in with the family, and his room is used to store all of the family’s furniture and junk, he finds that he cannot move around any more and goes off his food. He becomes shut off from his family and the lodgers.

When he hears his sister playing the violin for the lodgers, he opens the door to listen, and the lodgers, upon spotting this giant insect, are repulsed and declare they are going to move out immediately and will not pay the family any of their rent owed. Gregor’s sister tells her parents that they must get rid of their brother since, whilst they have tried to take care of him, he has become a liability. She switches from talking about him as her brother and as an ‘it’, a foreign creature that is unrecognisable as the brother they knew.

Gregor, overhearing this conversation, wants to do the right thing for his family, so he decides that he must do the honourable thing and disappear. He crawls off back to his room and dies.

Gregor’s family is relieved that he has died, and the body is disposed of. Mr Samsa kicks the lodgers out of the apartment. He, his wife, and their daughter are all happy with the jobs they have taken, and Mr and Mrs Samsa realise that their daughter is now of an age to marry.

The one thing people know about ‘The Metamorphosis’ is that it begins with Gregor Samsa waking up to find himself transformed into an insect. Many English translations use the word in the book’s famous opening line (and we follow convention by using the even more specific word ‘beetle’ in our summary of the story above).

But the German word Ungeziefer does not lend itself easily to translation. It roughly denotes any unclean being or creature, and ‘bug’ is a more accurate rendering of the original into English – though even ‘bug’ doesn’t quite do it, since (in English anyway) it still suggests an insect, or at least some sort of creepy-crawly.

For this reason, some translators (such as David Wyllie in the one we have linked to above) reach for the word vermin , which is probably closer to the German original. Kafka did use the word Insekt in his correspondence discussing the book, but ordered that the creature must not be explicitly illustrated as such at any cost. The point is that we are not supposed to know the precise thing into which Gregor has metamorphosed.

The vagueness is part of the effect: Gregor Samsa is any and every unworthy or downtrodden creature, shunned by those closest to him. Much as those who wish to denigrate a particular group of people – immigrants, foreigners, a socio-economic underclass – often reach for words like ‘cockroaches’ or ‘vermin’, so Gregor’s transformation physically enacts and literalizes such emotive propaganda.

But of course, the supernatural or even surreal (though we should reject the term ‘Surrealist’) setup for the story also means that ‘The Metamorphosis’ is less a straightforward allegory (where X = Y) than it is a more rich and ambiguous exploration of the treatment of ‘the other’ (where X might = Y, Z, or even A, B, or C).

Gregor’s subsequent treatment at the hands of his family, his family’s lodgers, and their servants may well strike a chord with not just ethnic minorities living in some communities but also disabled people, people with different cultural or religious beliefs from ‘the mainstream’, struggling artists whose development is hindered by crass bourgeois capitalism and utilitarianism, and many other marginalised individuals.

This is one reason why ‘The Metamorphosis’ has become so widely discussed, analysed, and studied: its meaning is not straightforward, its fantastical scenario posing many questions.  What did Kafka mean by such a story? Is it a comedy, a tragedy, or both? Gregor’s social isolation from his nearest and dearest, and subsequent death (a death of despair, one suspects, as much as it is a noble sacrifice for the sake of his family), all suggest the story’s tragic undercurrents, and yet the way Kafka establishes Gregor’s transformation raises some intriguing questions.

Take that opening paragraph. The opening sentence – as with the very first sentence of Kafka’s novel, The Trial – is well-known, but what follows this arresting first statement is just as remarkable. For no sooner has Gregor discovered that he has been transformed, inexplicably, into a giant insect (or ‘vermin’), than his thoughts have turned from this incredible revelation to more day-to-day worries about his job and his travelling.

This is a trademark feature of Kafka’s writing, and one of the things the wide-ranging term ‘Kafkaesque’ should accommodate: the nightmarish and the everyday rubbing shoulders together. Indeed, the everyday already is a nightmare, and Samsa’s metamorphosis into an alien creature is just the latest in a long line of modernity’s hellish developments.

So the effect of this opening paragraph is to play down, as soon as it has been introduced, the shocking revelation that a man has been turned into a beetle (or similar creature).

Many subsequent details in Kafka’s story are similarly downplayed, or treated in a calm and ordinary way as if a man becoming a six-feet-tall insect is the most normal occurrence in the world, and this is part of the comedy of Kafka’s novella: an aspect of his work which many readers miss, partly because the comedic is so often the first thing lost in translation.

And, running contrariwise to the interpretation of ‘The Metamorphosis’ that sees it as ‘just’ a straightforward story about modern-day alienation and mistreatment of ‘the other’ is the plot itself, which sees Gregor Samsa freed from his life of servitude and duty, undertaking a job he doesn’t enjoy in order to support a family that, it turns out, are perfectly capable of supporting themselves (first by the father’s money which has been set aside, and then from the family’s jobs which the mother, father, and daughter all take, and discover they actually rather enjoy).

Even Gregor’s climbing of the walls and ceiling in his room, when he would have been travelling around doing his job, represents a liberation of sorts, even though he has physically become confined to one room. Perhaps, the grim humour of Kafka’s story appears to suggest, modernity is so hellish that such a transformation – even though it ends in death – is really the only liberation modern man can achieve.

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Identity Crisis and Alienation in The Metamorphosis: Existential Approach

2020, LITERA KULTURA

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The proposed research paper endeavors to investigate the quest for emotional identity experienced by the narrator in Franz Kafka's novel The Metamorphosis. The novel opens with the narrator's realization that he has been transformed into a monstrous vermin, which can be perceived as Gregor's unintentional isolation from family and society. His Metamorphosis can be interpreted as a form of emotional escape from stressful reality and its dangers. It analyzes the emotional and psychological transformations experienced by the narrator, trying to be a part of something higher than what he was born. It narrates how he alienates himself from the surroundings while pretending someone that others wanted him to be. It represents a meta-conflict that budded in him due to a perplexing state of 'who he is' and 'what he wants to be.' Kafka's The Metamorphosis is a masterpiece of modern literature that examines universal concerns of despair, hope, and conflict an individual comes across in his alike Kafka.

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This paper aims to discuss Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis in terms of Heideggerian existentialism, concentrating on the aspects of existential loneliness, estrangement and dissolution of self. Thus, this work demonstrates how Kafka's narrative captures the fundamental aspects of existence in the context of Heidegger's concepts of Being-in-the-world, thrownness and Being-toward-death, and how Gregor Samsa's transformation embodies the challenges of the modern man. The realism of transformation has been discussed as the perspective of using the themes and motifs of the Kafka's work to illustrate the conditions of the dehumanization of the man during the postindustrial period as a subject reduced to the sphere of his economic activity, distancing from his essence and, as a result, suffering from loneliness and death. The implications of capitalist alienation and existential inauthenticity stand out in Kafka's literary pursuits and Heidegger's existential philosophies.

Poetika, 2017

This article explores Sartre’s concept of shame and alienation in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis through the portrayal of the protagonist. By focusing on the interpretation of the characteristics of Gregor Samsa through New Criticism approach, this article reveals that shame and alienation may occur when a person realizes that one is judged by others and sees oneself through the eyes of others. This way of looking at one’s identity is problematic because it creates complexity within the existence of the self. Through his fantastical transformation into an insect, Gregor cannot help but seeing himself from his family’s point of view. Instead of fighting for himself, he is made to believe that he deserves to be alienated. From the analysis of the protagonist, it is revealed that his being selfess and dutiful in a way trigger the shame and alienation that result in his submission to death. Keywords: alienation, Kafka, Sartre, shame

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This paper offers a critical comparative reading of the representation of animal and racial metamorphoses in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) and A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2015), respectively, with a view to underscoring how the processes and consequences of metamorphosing identity foreground biopolitics. While the first novel muses on the transformation of Gregor Samsa, a human being, into a monstrous vermin, the second novel, a farcical take on Kafka’s narrative, traces the transformation of Furo Wariboko, a black Nigerian, into a white-skinned man. The comparison is premised upon two axes: first, the human-animal interaction and tension that inform anthropocentric speciesism on one hand and the civilized-white/savage-black binary opposition on the other; second, the circuits of economic privilege and social accommodation. Exploring the ways in which we identify ourselves and are identified by the people in power, the paper locates the identity rubric of the human subject...

This paper looks at the philosophy of power, alienation and what's more, minor writing through an examination Franz Kafka's short story, The Metamorphosis . In the story the hero awakens a titan, caterpillar-like animal, which winds up changing his life, employment and family connections. The hidden subjects are estranged worker and activity of force through brain control. The premise is Karl Marx's part on Estranged Labor and the ideas of commodification, objectification and antagonism. There is additionally an investigation of Antonio Gramsci's idea of administration of force, which is fundamentally seen as controlling the brain by implication. Capital, including private property, riches and assets, has a tendency to amass in the hands of lesser and lesser individuals, leaving nothing for the masses or the worker that creates the riches. Force movements and capital streams however are both packed in a couple hands. Destitution material as well as of brain also, is a vital by-result of industrialist improvement through creation. The human worker turns into an item utilized for increasing the value of an item and in the process loses his compassion.

The aim of this manuscript is to consider Kafka’s The Metamorphosis in the light of Freudian psychological theories. Specifically, The Metamorphosis will be seen as Kafka’s own autobiography. The Metamorphosis is the dramatization of Gregor’s inner world, the world which is depicted by Kafka is the world of unconscious. Freud defined the unconscious as a world in which our suppressed wills, feelings, horrors, drives and conflicts are hold. Why Gregor transferred in to a big insect? Why he was killed by his father? Why he knows himself responsible for family financial problem? This paper aims to answer all these questions.

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This paper explores the philosophical themes present in Franz Kafka's seminal work, The Metamorphosis (1915). Through an analysis of the novella, the paper delves into how Kafka grapples with profound issues such as alienation, existential crisis, and the human condition. The paper examines the transformative journey of the protagonist, GregorSamsa, who undergoes a physical and psychological metamorphosis into a bug, serving as a metaphor for the human experience of feeling disconnected from oneself and others. By immersing readers in Gregor's surreal and isolating world, Kafka prompts introspection into the inherent struggles of human existence. Moreover, the paper explores Kafka's masterful use of absurdity and dark humor throughout the narrative, shedding light on the futility of human existence and the inevitability of death. By interweaving absurd and grimly humorous elements, Kafka offers a critique of societal norms and underscores the existential anxieties that arise when confronted with the absurdity of life. The pervasive sense of irony and bleakness in the novella serves to highlight the absurd and inherently flawed nature of the human condition. Furthermore, the research paper delves into the influences that shaped Kafka's philosophy, particularly his Jewish identity and experiences living in a rapidly changing, industrializing society. Kafka's writing reflects the anxieties and struggles of individuals in a modernized world, highlighting the existential dilemmas faced by those grappling with societal expectations and personal identity. By examining the philosophical dimensions of "The Metamorphosis," this paper offers a nuanced and in-depth analysis of Kafka's views on the human experience and the search for meaning in modern life. It invites readers to engage with the profound questions raised by Kafka's work and provides valuable insights into his philosophical stance.

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The Metamorphosis by Kafka: Literary Analysis Essay

Introduction, social aspects, cultural aspects, historical aspects, works cited.

In Kafka’s short story, a traveling salesman awakens one morning to discover that he has been changed into an insect. In the tale, the author highlights various aspects of his life, including his father, his family, and his plans for the future. He expressed his affection for the people in his life using analogies. Many claim that Kafka’s life and the Metamorphosis story are remarkably similar. Therefore, his story may be regarded as autobiographical. The story covers that time’s social, cultural, and historical aspects. These aspects are related to the Marxism of the 20 th century, the sense of alienation and women’s rights development, and societal change accordingly.

Materialization and the Marxist movement defined the 20th century. Following the Marxist theory, Gregor’s inability to work makes him useless to his family, who wants to achieve a higher social class (Mir 131). Samsa’s economic condition is the primary example of class conflict in the Metamorphosis, representing Marxism. Samsa’s family is not well off; Gregor has to pay his father’s debt, and after his inability to work, his family pays off their debt (Kafka 10). This makes the novella an example of a capitalist society (Mir 131). After Gregor’s transformation, and due to his incapacity to work, he passed away. As Mir argued, the main purpose of a Marxist society was to provide for one’s family and be useful.

He argues that after being transformed, Gregor was unable to feed himself. Hence, his future depended on the family’s charity, which eventually became so little food that he starved to death. Housekeeper found his dead body one morning and informed the household. After hearing the news, they opted not to grieve with sadness but relief. Mr. Samsa’s comment was, “Well… now we can thank God!” (Kafka 45). According to Mir, he was relieved of the financial responsibility of sustaining his son, which again indicates the Marxist approach (131). The family chose to visit the memorial service instead of grieving. Remembering their dead son, they talked about the financial gains after his passing, underlying his worth to the family (Mir 133). Thus, Kafka demonstrated one of the key aspects of his time in the story.

Alienation was another topic discussed when analyzing Metamorphosis by Kafka. Prakash argued that Marxism and Existentialism are credited with developing the idea of alienation (Prakash 183). In other words, alienation is essentially the dissimilated relationship between man and society and between people, involving the inner relationships between self and others (Prakash 183). Gregor was alienated in his room as soon as he ceased contributing to his family financially and by working. This demonstrates that his family utterly disregarded Gregor as anything other than a means of obtaining material gain. Prakash also finds a correlation between the character’s alienation and the writer. Kafka struggled with alienation being a German speaker in the Czech Republic, making him a minority. Moreover, he was a Jew, which made him a minority within a minority.

Many researchers focused on the notion of alienation in Kafka’s work. Furthermore, questions of alienation and culture were also raised by Saperstein (12). Ovid repeatedly emphasizes the value of art in the Metamorphosis and that the story covers a difficult relationship between a father and a son, which was inspired by Kafka’s work. Although, in this case, the dilemma between the characters revolved around art. Rather than have Phaeton admire the art, Ovid has the narrator describe it. This underlined the main issue when Phaeton, much like Gregor, did not feel any support from Ovid, feeling lost and alienated, much like Kafka himself.

Joshi studied Kafka’s work with a gender-based concern that has been central to the study of the author’s text ever since the evolution of gender studies. Mr. Samsa, who employs physical force, represents Kafka’s father and serves as an example of his manliness every time he drives Gregor back to his room in all three parts of the Metamorphosis (Joshi 65). After transformation, Gregor is treated like a non-masculine identity; he is faced with discrimination, marginalization, and degradation, as he is put away from his previous state further and further (Joshi 71). His masculinity, in a way, is being neutered and even infantilized.

Kafka began writing at a time of significant and rapid cultural changes, amongst which one of the most pivotal ones was women’s liberation movements (Joshi 72). The right to vote, working rights, and inclusion in universities for women started changing the world for them and, consequently, for men. Grete becomes his caretaker, a reversal of what is shown in Gregor’s memories, where he takes care of Grete’s needs (Joshi 72). This reflected the actual events at that time, where women became more empowered.

Kafka did a wonderful job underlying all the important aspects of his time in the Metamorphosis . As it has been stated numerous times, this work is almost autobiographical. Kafka discussed his family issues and troubles, focusing on his relationships with his father and sisters and on key moments of that time. He implied a Marxist approach to the characters’ relationships and talked about a familiar sense of alienation and the rise of women’s liberation movements. The story is a reflection of Kafka’s life and the society of that time.

Joshi, Shubham. “ A Gender Study of Franz Kafka and His Work The Metamorphosis .” Contemporary Literary Review India 8.2 , 2021, pp. 57–90. Web.

Kafka, Frank. “The Metamorphosis.” Sirius , 2018. Web.

Mir, Shabir Ahmad. “ Explicating Kafka’s Metamorphosis within the ambit of Marxism .” International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 4, 2019, pp. 128–133. Web.

Prakash, Divyam. “The Comparative Study on the Theme of Alienation and Self Deception in “ The Metamorphosis ” and “ I – Not I .” Assonance, 2018, pp. 182-192. Web.

Saperstein, David. “Metamorphosis: Book II: The Cocoon Story Continues.” Talos, 2018

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Experimental Novels › Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 1, 2023

“As Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” So begins The Metamorphosis , a sinister allegory of dehumanization and hopelessness in the modern world by Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Once rendered an insect, Gregor becomes a functionless and embarrassing eyesore in a household, whose members grow to resent and neglect him to the point of death. There is no place in domestic, social, and professional life, Kafka’s tale suggests, for the unproductive and the nonconformist.

Written in 1912, The Metamorphosis was one of the few works Kafka published in his lifetime. Owing to the author’s general reluctance to publish and editorial reservations about the story’s bizarre content, The Metamorphosis did not go to press until 1915.

Like much of Kafka’s fiction, The Metamorphosis expresses dominant themes in the author’s own life. In a letter, Kafka mentioned the similarity between Samsa’s name and his own; both writer and character, furthermore, were pressured to take on largely pointless office jobs. Kafka’s anxieties about ill health and fear of physical collapse play out in the unfortunate Gregor, who dies from a wound inflicted on him by his father. But the story resonates most profoundly with the real circumstances of Kafka’s family life. Like his creation, Gregor, Kafka was continually berated by his imposing father, who considered his only son to be an unmitigated failure. Gregor, likewise, cowers in fear of his father, who finds him repulsive and attacks him at every turn. Although Kafka had earned a law degree in part to appease his father, he would remain an object of patriarchal disdain and repudiation—particularly in light of his fictional work, which his father deemed “a waste of time.” Kafka’s mother, like her alter ego in the story, was ever-deferential to her husband and offered little solace to her son; his sister, Ottla, was normally a compassionate ally, but on one occasion she joined the parents in insisting that Kafka increase his hours at the office; shortly thereafter, Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor’s sister betrays him by insisting that the family get rid of him.

In addition to these autobiographical references, The Metamorphosis alludes to a number of literary works, including the Russian Nikolay Gogol’s The Nose, in which a man wakes up to find his nose missing; preposterously, the nose goes on to attain a high-ranking position in the civil service. Kafka’s text was also inspired by a Yiddish play, Gordin’s The Savage One. Kafka wrote extensively about the play in his diaries. All of the characters in The Metamorphosis find analogues in The Savage One. Gregor Samsa’s counterpart is an idiot son, who is unable to communicate with his family, stays locked in his room, and fears the wrath of his father. The Metamorphosis, furthermore, resembles Gordin’s drama in its entirely domestic setting and episodic narrative structure. All three texts connect materialism and status consciousness with the degradation of humanity.

In alignment with Kafka’s largely cynical philosophical views, The Metamorphosis supports a decidedly pessimistic interpretation of human nature. Speaking to his friend Max Brod, Kafka once explained that he thought human beings were God’s nihilistic thoughts. Brod asked whether there was hope elsewhere in the universe. To this, Kafka replied, “plenty of hope, for God—only not for us.” This dismal prognosis, a sense of terminal confinement, is represented by Gregor, whose only alternative to the world in which he has unintentionally entered is death. There are glimmers of hope in the concluding lines of The Metamorphosis, as the Samsa family sets about reconstructing itself, but this might also be seen to indicate the unfortunate perpetuation of the worst human qualities. In any case, after the story’s publication Kafka said that he regretted this ending, insisting that it was “unreadable.”

Along with the bleak determinism of The Metamorphosis , the surrealistic scenario depicted—its particular mixture of the impossible and the real—is typically “Kafkaesque.” In several works, Kafka posits an unlikely situation and portrays its development in realistic detail, both psychologically and materially. In his novel The Trial , for example, a man is accused and found guilty of a crime without ever being informed of the charge’s precise nature; in “Before the Law,” a man passes decades waiting to enter the gates of Justice, only to have the guardian, finally, close them in his face. The realist aspect of these texts encourages the reader to probe beyond the specific circumstance—a man, for example, literally becoming an insect—to uncover its symbolic and allegorical implications.

The image of the insect is evocative on several levels. As early as 1907, Kafka described the best part of his creative self as a “beautiful beetle”; he imagined his body moving around in the world while his “true writing self”—a beetle—remained behind. In later years, when his idealism faded, this authorial image was replaced by “filth and slime,” a phrase he applied to his piece “The Judgment” (it tells of a rebellious son condemned to suicide by his father). Gregor Samsa, a giant insect who becomes progressively more and more filthy, may be interpreted as a metaphor for disillusionment.

Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Novels

Analysis of Franz Kafka’s Stories

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bridgewater, Patrick. Kafka’s Novels: An Interpretation. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. Greenberg, Martin. The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Stach, Reiner. Kafka: The Decisive Years. Translated by Shelley Frisch. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2005. Stern, J. P., ed. The World of Franz Kafka. New York: Holt, Rinehard, 1980. Weinberg, Helen. The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.

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The Metamorphosis

Alienation and humanity in the metamorphosis timothy sexton.

In his short story "The Metamorphosis" Franz Kafka examines the alienation from society that turns a human being into a bug. At the same time, he also examines how not being alienated from society and how corroborating with society can turn human beings into lesser life forms who have more in common with thoughtless, instinctual insects. Gregor Samsa is clearly unhappy with his life and alienated from the expectations placed upon him by his family in particular and society as a whole. "If I didn't have my parents to think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything, I would let him know just what I feel," Gregor says. But of course, he can't tell his boss how he feels. How he feels is thoroughly beside the point. Gregor is a cog in the machine, not much different from a drone bee or a worker ant. Gregor's boss has no more interest in Gregor's ambitions than the queen bees have in their drones. Gregor's alienation is symbolically represented in his transformation; his bugdom is symbolic of his uselessness to the cycle once he has begun to question the validity of it. Just as humans crush bugs...

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