To me, one of the most intriguing aspects of The Metamorphosis is the narration style. As discussed in class, the narrator seems to be a detached observer, as if conducting an experiment on the Samsa family. In class, Joey mentioned that he thinks the "experiment" (if we take this hypothesis to be true) is conducted on the whole family rather than just on Gregor. That is, whatever being is organizing the test is comparing how the family reacts to their providing son becoming a "gigantic insect" versus how they, or any normal family, acted when life was routine. I'm not sure I agree entirely with this, because of the narrator's perspective. In the novella, we are forced to look at the world from Gregor's point of view. This is not unbiased, this is designed to make us feel sympathy for him. Perhaps the experiment is actually about how a person percieves their family and work. Gregor's first reaction to being a cockroach is to think about getting to work, and then he thinks about how he spports his family. Over the course of the book, he praises his sister often. He fears his father, but also has a degree of respect for him. Maybe the book is trying to show how he needs emotional support from his family, since seeing people he cares about turn on him breaks him inside, eventually leading to his death after his sister's outburst.
Maybe we are completely misguided, and it is not an experiment at all. Maybe his family really does still love him, and are acting happy at the end of the book to hide their sadness. The narrator is not omnipotent, he relates what he onserves in Gregor's mind and from what a person outside can see. One possibility is that for the last passage (after his death), the narrator is still conveying Gregor's point of view, just now from heaven!
It is interesting how the narration style becomes much more impersonal after his death, and there are again many possible interpretations for this. Does the narrator lose interest in the story, but want to wrap it up? Is he realizing that he became too involved with Gregor, and is desperately trying to save face in his scientific Deity community by detachedly observing the actions of the Samsas post-Gregor?
Is Kafka just pulling a prank on all of us and just randomly changing the narrative style to mess with our minds? Is he attempting to rescue the thousands of schoolchildren in need of blog post topics? The world may never know...
2 comments:
I'm not sure we need to posit an afterlife-perspective for the postmortem insect that used to be Gregor to account for the weird narration at the end, but it sure does seem to reflect his way of viewing his family and how they view (and treat) him. Their relief and joy at being rid of him suits his self-deprecation perfectly--they "confirm" what he's always suspected. But I don't see any effort to "hide sadness" among his family--the narrative seems "omniscient" here in that there's no specific reason to undermine its credibility. They really do react this way. But if we look at it as if, in their view, "Gregor" has been gone since the transformation first happens, it is possible to view this as the end of a period of mourning.
I agree that the heaven idea is pretty obscure, bt my main goal in this post was just to throw out a bunch of random ideas that came to me as I was writing. One could certainly see the ending as you suggest here, and it does seem to me the most logical interpretation.
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