First Impressions

    On the first day of class, we were given a summary of the Metamorphosis; a weird book where the main character wakes up as a giant cockroach. From this, I expected the book to start out with the main character, Gregor Samsa, living his life normally, then about fifteen pages in, waking up, finding himself to have become a cockroach, and proceeding to freak out and do rash, funny things in his acts of desperateness. I missed the mark almost completely even though Gregor does act desperate, but he is desperate in a completely different way. But anyways, going back to the first paragraph. I was pretty much shocked. It seemed almost as though I was being sucked in to the story without noticing it, and every time there was something creepy or unsettling, I still kept on reading. It is like watching two cars crash, you just keep staring. Same here, no matter how gross things are, you still keep reading. We get the moments when Gregor is trying to open the door, or when he is running after the manager, etc. And then we get moments when he is trying to get out of bed, and when his dad is getting him back into his room; funny moments when you are both laughing and then thinking that you shouldn't be finding this funny. I am not sure if this is an appropriate analogy, but it's like while reading this book, I feel like one does when someone claws at a chalk board, or when chalk makes that loud shriek-like sound. This book keeps me awake, but at the same time I both want to put it down, but cant really, or unconsciously don't want to. Everything in the first section seemed to happen so fast. As Gregor was acting sheer desperateness, there was a lot of energy fed off to the reader, and it made everything seem so fast and uncontrolled almost. 

      There are also a lot of sad moments in the book. The part where Gregor is trying to stand up while at the same time muttering about his job and how he needs to stand up. Or when he tries to eat his breakfast and realizes that he doesn't like milk anymore. Sometimes these moments are slightly pathetic, but even so they are really sad. Kafka is really good at playing with emotions and reactions that come deep from the heart, not surface things like outright laughter or tears. The moment when Gregor is thinking about his sister and how he dreamed of how to send her to the Conservatory and how he had tried to so hard to get money for his family seem almost painful to read as Gregor doesn't realize he is a cockroach now. There is a feeling that he understands that he wont be able to do anything of what he wanted to, but its mostly the reader who understands this best. But we don't always feel sympathy for Gregor. There are times when we can be pleasantly surprised. For example, when he is talking about the amount of money that he had saved from every paycheck. He talks about it as if it were a small amount of money, but turns out that it is enough to hold the family through a year. In Gregor's humbled views that is a little, or more rather, not enough. But in reality, that is a lot of money considering that people need to pay for food, bills, clothes, taxes, etc. More over, there are four people in the family. So we get a sudden respect for Gregor's work as we see just how much money he has been making over this long period of time. And then, we gain even more sympathy and respect for Gregor when we find out that he solely has been responsible for the high quality of life that he has provided for the rest of the family. His parents have indeed used and exploited him. It is not like they live poorly and only the son could help pay off the debts. They live very well with enough food for the dad to get fat, the mother not have anything to do all day but lie on the sofa, and the daughter to go around and be pampered with pretty clothes. So, overall we become supportive of Gregor over the first half of the story.  

   I guess this book is just a toss up of emotions and perspectives as we constantly change from one to another; we are unsettled one minute, laughing another, or we are disappointed in Gregor, then supportive of him. It is a complicated mash-up of everything as if to see how much the reader can handle. But it is a nice arrangement of stress and resolve, or its lack of. It just makes the story so much more interesting, and in some way easier, to read. So I look forward to reading more, to see what unexpected situation Kafka puts Gregor in to test his metamorphosis.