He must find a way to connect his prior humanity to a very un-human form. Kafka spends a great deal of the novel focusing on Gregor’s state of mind and how he tries to come to terms with his new body. In fact, they could not have reacted less helpfully. The calm that he sought from his family members did not manifest. He is still in shock, unwilling to accept the fact that his life really has changed and there’s not going to be a trip to the station and the resumption of his duties as a travelling salesman. In this quote, he is considering what’s going to happen once his family sees him for the first time. But if they took everything calmly, he he, too, had no reason to get excited and could, if he hurried, actually be at the station by eight o’clock. If they were shocked, then Gregor had no further responsibility and could be calm.

Their perspective of him, as undeserved as it was, is made real by Kafka and Gregor is forced to contend with the reality of his world. His family, his work colleagues, and the rest of the world always treated him like vermin. It is also a representative of the way that the world at large has been treating him for much longer than he really considered. The bug-form that Gregor wakes up in is grotesque, painful, and shocking. One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous bug… It simply happened, for no reason or for every reason. The most intriguing part of this transformation is the fact that Franz Kafka never provides an explanation for it. Before Gregor is aware of what has happened to him, the reader is told, point blank, that he’s been changed into a “monstrous bug”. The novel may focus on Gregor’s interior life, but one would be remiss not to consider the shocking opening lines of the novel that reveal the transformation to the reader. Despite his creature-like appearance, this is a very human story of a man faced with the greatest of disruptions to his life. His strife, horror, loss, and death are much more the focus than is the fact that he was transformed into a giant bug. Gregor’s emotional and mental development, as well as his changing perspective on his situation, are the main focus of the short novel.

The trial and metamorphosis