The humanity of Kafka

Some thoughts on Kafka’s Metamorphosis

It’s been a few months since I read this short story, but I just wanted to jot down some things I thought were interesting to me while reading it.

How exactly do we find ourselves here? How did we end up with the people we call our family? Kafka explores this reality, a sense that the main character was born into this family, from this role in his birth he had certain duties and obligations, and that he fulfilled those duties as best he could.

Until he started changing.

He started to change into a non-person. And has he changed into a non-person, the people he was living with, his family, started to change their perceptions towards him. 

He thought like a human being, sort of, and he thought he still had a human mind, but most of his family members only treated him as a member of the family out of the remembrance of who he was before he was a giant insect. 

One-by-one, the family members started to turn against him, as all of his humanity was lost to them. In the end, even his sister, his only real ally and last connection to humanity, did not want to help him any longer. She, too, could no longer connect to him, even with her strong loyalties. 

And that’s how it ended for him. He starved to death as a big bug in his room, and no one really cared. For the family, they had moved on. They stopped seeing the big bug as their son/brother/friend a long time ago. So when it died, no one cared. It would be the same as if a cockroach died in the kitchen. Would you care? I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t care about a cockroach, because it’s not human. It’s a pest. A non-human.

Kafka showed us that our loyalties and our humanity are only extended so far, about as far as yourself, because only when we see ourselves in others, do we extend a helping hand. Only when we see ‘them’ as ‘us’, do we lift a finger. Otherwise, we lift the boot and squash it.

This is what Kafka said towards the end of his life: