Inbetween A Rock And A Hardplace

Imagine waking up one morning and realizing you are different from the night before. Different in a competently different way than normal. You are a bug. A huge cockroach to be exact. This happens to a man named Gregor Samsa, in Kafka's Metamorphosis. Gregor wakes up one morning and he has been transformed into a huge creepy crawly bug. His first thoughts aren't, "huh, maybe I should freak out and get help or something." No, his first thoughts are, "man my job is taxing to my body and how much I sleep. I have so much stress catching the trains everywhere, and I should be getting to work soon." He then sees his little tiny squirming legs. Yet again-instead of freaking out and making noise until someone came to his aid, he tries to figure out a way to get out of bed and get to work as fast as possible because he overslept. To him, this transformation is only a minor problem in getting to the things that need to be done. He is so transfixed on his work that he has turned into the monster that we see in someone who will work, over everything else. He has a job. He needs to pay back his parent's dept, and he is looking out for them even though they have a maid sucking even more money out of their household. They have gotten themselves into this mess, and they have their child have a sucky job for 20 years to pay for their wasting of dough. Gregor is a really nice guy to take up this burden from his parents, but he is going mad with his job.

I noticed that Gregor's room resembles a lot of interesting things by itself. First of all, when he first wakes up he is described as being in a very rectangle- almost cage shaped bed. He is then described as being in a bland, also rectangle shaped room. He is surrounded by a door on three sides of his room, and then a window pointing to the sad gray world. He is literally locking in on 3 sides, and has a depressing view on the last side. His room is his cage. Another metaphorical thing in his room is his only picture frame. Instead of having a picture of his family, or a girlfriend, or just a friend in general, he has the women that comes in the frame as advertisement. Just from this little piece of info, you know Gregor is an incredibly lonely man. If you have no significant memory with family or ANYONE, you have problems and need to get out more. This just adds to the fact that he spends too much of his time working. If Gregor could just get his head out of his job for one minute, none of this would have happened! The moral of this story is: don't spend so much time working; love yourself and you will never be as helpless as a bug.