Race to Death

Fables are very simple. For this reason, they have endured throughout time and many, many have been written. All fables teach a lesson, possibly without the reader noticing at all; in that way they are profound. Now that these silly little stories have reached the modernist age of literature, authors like Franz Kafka have taken it to the next level. These modernists try to decode the nature and purpose of, not life, but living life. Kafka, following his modernist movement, wrote an existential fable that follows the life of a former person turned verminous bug. Through his Metamorphosis, Kafka explains and warns of today's society and implies ways of correcting this through self-fulfillment. Although many readers do not understand the purpose of this piece, once deciphered, Metamorphosis is simply a fable with existential lessons and warnings applied to society, written through a modernist lens.

In Kafka's modernist era, it was clear to see how mundane the lives of many had become. The dreary lifestyle focused completely on work and money had taken over. Gregor, living in the time, was the same way. His mom says, "'The young man has nothing in his head except business. I’m almost angry that he never goes out in the evening. Right now he’s been in the city eight days, but he’s been at home every evening'" (Kafka 4). This fretwork is no real way to live life. The existential phrase that goes behind this is, Everybody dies, but not everybody lives. The goal of life is not to simply to exist, but to live a meaningful life not by society's standards, but the self's. Gregor is caught in this system of social responsibilities and is content with it, even though he shouldn't be. His passiveness is evident in the story and universally disdained by most readers. "Once I’ve got together the money to pay off my parents’ debt to him—that should take another five or six years—I’ll do it for sure. Then I’ll make the big break" (Kafka 1). These years, by modernist and existential standards are being wasted away, and they are willingly wasted by an unknowing Gregor too ignorant to realize the meaninglessness of his work. Why is life merely a race to death? Humans have accomplished far too much to be stricken with an overwhelming force that tears down the dreams of the people. To be sucked into this system is normal, and can be looked down upon by a third party, but is generally accepted. The annoying issue with Gregor is that he takes on the burden of his parents' debt and entraps himself into the system willingly. His entrapment becomes so deeply rooted, he remains irrationally dedicated to the job even when he is no longer human. "If I didn’t hold back for my parents’ sake, I’d have quit ages ago. I would’ve gone to the boss and told him just what I think from the bottom of my heart" (Kafka 1). Gregor is not living life on account of his parents. The right thing to do here, Kafka is arguing, is to help yourself more than anything. Selflessness is virtuous, but taking it to the point where it infringes on one's own freedom is taking it too far. Focusing on the self is increasingly important as society requires more drones to fall in line. The ignorant ones, like Gregor, are left to simply exist, and to be at the whims of other people. 

Kafka inlays many ideas into Metamorphosis, one of them being the problem of how the self acts in modern society, as Gregor struggles with. Another is how the masses, represented by the family act in society, and many behave selfishly. Gregor's family is widely resented in this story, and understandably so. They lounge around all day, sleep in, take naps, and let Gregor pay off a debt that is theirs. They are leeches, or possibly more accurately, vampires. Vampirism is, as Thomas Foster puts it, "...exploitation in its many forms. Using other people to get what you want. Denying someone else's right to live in the face of our overwhelming demands. Placing our desires, particularly our uglier ones, above the needs of another" (Foster 21). He also says that the less obvious vampires are much more scary and dangerous than the obvious ones. This is Gregor's family. They are vampires and during the story they are sucking his blood and consequently his life right out, up until his death. Thinking of vampires in literature, they only suck to the point where their victims remain alive but infected. The vampires of human society suck and suck, always wanting more, until the resource has dried up completely. More specifically, and applying the family's vampirism again the Foster's piece, the family becomes even more awful when one thinks about the way they treat Gregor especially at the dinner table. Eating food is so basic to humans, so intimate, that it has become very important to the world. "The act of taking food into our bodies is so personal that we really only want to do it with people with we're very comfortable with" (Foster 8). The family is a collective vampire, and throughout the story they reject Gregor from the dinner table, confining him to his prison of a room, while they eat food paid for by Gregor himself. This tells especially Gregor that the family barely cares for him emotionally at all. They have lost all sense of kinship with and love for him and don't regard him as human. Moreover, the vampire that is society chooses the weak as their victims, and Gregor is the poor selfless victim being taken advantaged of and ultimately killed by his own family. "...and [Dracula] tends to focus on beautiful, unmarried women" (Foster 16). Gregor fits this profile by being alluring and beautiful with his financial upside, and he is unprotected. Nobody steps in and tries to retrieve Gregor from the depths of the societal abyss, and the same goes in the real world. It is a dog-eat-dog world, where only the strong survive. This overlaps with the existential meaning; every person has a choice to rid themselves of this and gain a respite in a more self-reflecting world.

Kafka also uses vampires and the dangers of society to create a story of dark humor. This humor is largely based on irony. Many readers do not understand the patently kafkaesque style of humor, but David Foster Wallace does, and he writes a speech, Laughing with Kafka, that tries to explain this interesting, modernist humor. "Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the primordial little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal" (Wallace 2). Wallace is saying that Kafka's stories are really basic at its core, but some can't see this because they immediately associate his writing with nightmares. Kafka's humor is hard to understand without assistance, but with it, it becomes quite simple. One of Kafka's 'jokes' is the cruel situation of Gregor trapped in his room by his family, unwelcome in the common places, like the dinner table, of the house. "Earlier, when the door had been barred, they had all wanted to come in to him; now, when he had opened one door and when the others had obviously been opened during the day, no one came any more, and now the keys were stuck in the locks on the outside" (Kafka 10). Kafka laughs at this due to its irony; Gregor trapped himself in the woes of society and now all he wants is to be released from his prison of a room, but cannot achieve this goal. He had to be morphed into a bug to escape, but only to a more tangible form of imprisonment that can be more easily understood. Another irony Kafka exposes of Gregor's life in society is his uselessness. "Often he lay there all night long, not sleeping at all, just scratching on the leather for hours at a time. Or he undertook the very difficult task of pushing a chair over to the window" (Kafka 13). As a bug, Gregor sits around all day, either sleeping or creeping around to no end goal. He just wastes time and space, essentially, and that is what he was doing in the human state, as well. Moving back to an existential standpoint, Kafka says that when one is just existing rather than living, it doesn't matter if Gregor is a person or a bug, it all is the same. One needs to live to achieve the standard of being a real person.

Kafka's Metamorphosis, after the arduous processing of decoding his hidden messages and warnings, can be seen as a much more simple piece: a fable. This fable's main goal is to expose the ills of modern society and it's uselessness when looked at from an existential standpoint. Kafka saw that the world was growing more gray and gloomy, with no glimmer of true gladness. He stresses the importance of the self and how it is indeed more important than the overwhelming vampire that is society. Joseph Campbell has warned of not following the 'machine,' the overwhelming force in life but to break free of it instead. Kafka urges his multitude of readers to do the same thing, and to not end up like Gregor, small and pitiful. So, what's the point? With all the working and stress of this time that has come to eclipse all other aspects of life, the joy of experiencing the world and making life fruitful gets left out. Modernists ask, 'Why is life merely a race to death?' That is the question. Everyone dies, and so it is every person's duty to throw of the duties of society and follow the self. Kafka's message: Do not spectate, participate. Do not follow, lead. Do not exist, live.