DISCLAIMER: This post has a positive tone but I’m not a fan of Gregor’s fam
This is definitely going out on a limb, but while I was commenting on Madie’s blog I was struck by a parallel between the Samsa family’s metamorphosis and a rags-to-riches story - sorry, not for Gregor.
Such tales usually start by showing us how terrible the protagonist’s life is, and then narrating an event that changes everything. The Metamorphosis starts differently - we see the event that changes everything, but boy oh boy it isn’t the magical lamp from Aladdin. Working backwards, we can see how much Gregor’s life sucked, but also how shut in his family was - even though many of their constraints were self-imposed.
So, what actually are the hardships of the Samsas before Gregor transforms? He picked an apartment for them which they hate, yet they never mention it to him. They are shut in/stuck in this apartment because their father is ‘too feeble to work’ and they have to take care of him. Poor Grete dreams of going to the violin conservatory, but it will never work out because of her father’s debts, which Gregor is working to pay off. Sounds pretty grim. And THEN Gregor turns into a giant bug.
Now comes the success and working-through-hardship-towards-a-goal montage. Since The Metamorphosis features Gregor, who’s shut in his room for most of the novel, we only learn bits and pieces of the family’s changing life. But it all comes together the second time Gregor leaves his room. We see that Gregor’s father is stronger, more confident, and has a job at a bank, complete with a prestigious (or pretentious) uniform. Gregor’s mother has taken up sewing work, and Grete -- ironically -- is a salesgirl. To everyone’s surprise, the family is getting along perfectly fine without Gregor - they even had money saved up before his transformation.
The next stage in a rags-to-riches story is the crisis, which I think is most prominent in part III, where Gregor emerges from his room and scares the tenants. At this point, he’s been a bug for months with no sign of changing and no indication that he is still Gregor. The Samsas’ are feeling worked to the bone, are in a bad spot with their tenants, and this horrifying bug is still there. They want to move on with their lives, and Grete makes them come to terms with the fact (empirical from their point of view) that this insect isn’t Gregor. There’s no boss battle where the Samsas prove their worth and show off their independence, but ultimately the challenge (Gregor) disappears.
The ending is definitely typical of the rags-to-riches genre; Herr Samsa, Frau Samsa and Grete take a day off work (asserting their independence) and head off to the country to relax. Along the way they discuss their jobs, and realize they are “very good and held particularly good promise for the future.” They fantasize about moving to a new and smaller flat, and finding a husband for Grete. Summarily, the Samsas have everything they need and adventures ahead as they literally walk off into the country sun.
It's true that the arc of the story does follow an ironic inversion of this rags-to-riches story (ironic from Gregor's point of view, at least), but as with everything in Kafka, there are crucial deviations from the convention. The first of these is that the family is hardly in "rags" when we first meet them--they have a spacious apartment, a maid, four-hour breakfasts, etc. There's this sense of crisis initially, when Gregor's transformation seems to threaten their livelihood, but we see them "transformed" by this new incentive to get up and get a job. They flourish in his absence, an arc capped by the "happy ending." There's a cruel irony here--it's not that Gregor would be *pleased* to see them suffer as a result of his sudden incapacitation, but it would confirm his sense of his own importance to the family economy. In fact, we see that he hardly mattered to begin with, and may indeed have been holding them back.
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