Alienation In The Metamorphosis

Capitalistic Society and Alienation in The Metamorphosis The human psyche is a fragile and complicated entity. In the text, The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka introduces Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman that wakes up to find himself turned into an insect. There are no rhetoric or complications with the assessment. There is never an explanation given as to why this transformation or metamorphosis has occurred. Thus, due to Samsa’s transformation, Gregor Samsa is continuously isolated from the rest of his family who in turn, isolate Samsa even more as time passes. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, shows the capitalist system 's dehumanizing and alienating effect on Gregor Samsa through an economic perspective. Gregor is constantly exploited by his

His father then stopped working altogether, satisfied with the work Gregor was doing for the household, his sister Grete was too young to work, and his mother was ill with asthma. Samsa’s father, as stated before, is content with exploiting Gregor’s physical and economic labor, therefore Gregor’s father would take breakfast for a greater portion of the day, “breakfast was the most important meal of the day and he would stretch it out for several hours as he sat reading a number of different newspapers” (Kafka) Therefore, young Gregor not only supported the whole family with his travelling salesman salary, but also found for them the apartment they are now living in. This apartment is divided into segments as he will be divided himself. Gregor is mostly away

“His day-to-day existence, on the surface of his daily worries, comes to a sudden standstill. Gregor has pierced the surface. He awakes to an inexpressible feeling of alienation from the world around him, to which he had adapted himself to the point of self-oblivion” (Tauber 19-20). Gregor is also alienated in other ways. Samsa is alienated from the rest of his family in the fact that they are a capitalistic society in and of themselves that have commoditized Samsa into being a commodity. “The individual is estranged from himself insofar as he is alienated from his essential nature as a human being” (Sokel 2). Gregor’s job is imposed on him by his family solely for an economic necessity, he is not only a worker alienated from his own work; he is separated from his own humanity. In this sense, Gregor Samsa is enacted a form of self- alienation. “Human self-alienation is not restricted to factory work, but includes any kind of work in which an individual is engaged merely for the wage or income it brings him” (Sokel 2). Samsa is so ingrained with the idea of working, that even in a different body, these urges are ever present. Gregor finds his job unbearable, that he has been thinking about telling his boss his opinion about the situation. Kafka, says Howard Fast, “is concerned only with proving that a certain type of human being is so like a cockroach that it is entirely plausible for him to wake up one morning and discover