Study Questions on Kafka's The Metamorphosis

English 207: World Folktales and Literature

Dr. Tina L. Hanlon
Ferrum College
thanlon@ferrum.edu

Folktales and Literature Course Home Page

"The terror of art is that the dream reveals the reality."
Kafka in a discussion of The Metamorphosis

Online text of The Metamorphosis

Note: I most likely copied or adapted some of these questions from a variety of teaching resources. Think about these questions as you read Kafka's story. If you wish, use any of the questions that give you ideas for writing in your journal.

Background: Franz Kafka, one of the most influential writers of the early twentieth century, was born in Prague in 1883 and died in 1924. He was Jewish in Catholic Czechoslovakia, the son of a German-speaking shopkeeper. His father pushed him into business but he was interested in literature. Kafka lived with his parents most of his life although he felt neglected by his mother and pressured by his father. He earned a law degree and worked in a large accident-insurance corporation until he died of tuberculosis in 1924. Before his death he published a number of short stories and two novellas, including The Metamorphosis (1915). His executor Max Brod ignored Kafka's instructions to burn his manuscripts, instead publishing three novels that were nearly completed at his death. The predicaments and terrors described in his writing have been considered relevant to modern readers since Kafka's early death. He did not live to see his three sisters die in concentration camps, but some of his works seem to predict conditions of the World War II Holocaust. In his personal writings and fiction, Kafka reveals the torment and frustrations of his life: his illness, lack of success in love, unhappiness with his family, resentment of his beaurocratic job and an indifferent or oppressive society, and general feelings of inferiority.

His characters' lonely search for the meaning of individual existence in a meaningless or indifferent world reflects Kafka's existentialist views of life. People who are not dependent on older belief systems or institutions have freedom that also brings anxiety and guilt with the responsibility for constructing the meaning of one's own existence. Kafka had no association with Surrealist writers or artists, who saw hidden miracles of existence behind everyday reality. Kafka's works are sometimes called surreal because of his blend of matter-of-fact everyday reality and dream or nightmare images, but his vision of the ordinary person's impossible struggles to control life is quite different from the views of the Surrealists who came after him. Like absurdist writers of the mid-twentieth century, Kafka depicted irrational, anguished people in nightmarish situations, unable to form significant relationships with(in) their environment. Later in the twentieth century, the development of magic realism might also be compared with Kafka's writing, as fantastic events are depicted as if they are a part of everyday reality.

1. What is the effect of Kafka's matter-of-fact assertion of the bizarre incidents with which the story begins? How does Kafka keep the way it came to pass from becoming a major issue in the story?

2. What is the relationship between realism and fantasy in this story? What are some details that make the fantastic story credible?

3. What are Gregor's concerns in section I? To what degree do they differ from what would matter to him if he had not been transformed into an insect?

4. Why does Gregor dismiss the idea of calling for help when he tries to get out of bed?

5. What seems most important to members of his family as he lies in bed?

6. How do you view the reactions of Gregor's parents to their first view of his metamorphosis? What circumstances in ordinary life might elicit a similar response?

7. What is the significance of the view from Gregor's window?

8. Trace Gregor's adaptation to his new body. In what ways do the satisfactions of his life as an insect differ from the satisfactions of his life as a traveling salesman?

9. When Gregor's father pushes him back into his room at the end of section I, why does Kafka call it "literally a deliverance"?

10. How does Grete treat Gregor in section II? Is he ill?

11. What are Gregor's hopes for the future? Is there anything wrong with those hopes?

12. For a time, Gregor is ashamed of his condition and tries to hide from everyone. In what way might this be called a step forward for him?

13. What conflicting feelings does Gregor have about having the furniture taken out of his room? Why does he try to save the picture? What might Kafka's intention be in stressing that it is on this occasion that Grete calls Gregor by his name for the first time since his metamorphosis?

14. Why does Gregor's father behave as he does when Gregor "breaks loose"? Explain the situation that has developed by the end of section II?

15. How does the charwoman relate to Gregor? Why is she the one who presides over his "funeral"?

16. Compare the role of the lodgers in the family with Gregor's role. Have they supplanted him? Why does Gregor's father send them away in the morning?

17. How does Gregor's condition deteriorate by the end of the story, in his environment and within himself?

18. How does Gregor's family behave at the end of the story? What are your reactions to the events and atmosphere at the end?

19. What symbolic objects or other details appear in the story? Do they have connections with earlier mythologies or legends or literature?

20. How does this story compare with other transformation stories or animal stories we are studying? What makes the narrative approach of this modern story different from a folktale?