Thursday, October 15, 2015
Gregor's Sense of Purpose
Gregor is a very interesting character due to the fact that the Metamorphosis has a unique premise. Given the fact that he is a bug and the dynamic that he can understand what the humans in the story say without being able to acknowledge it in any way makes for a really tragic experience on Gregor’s part in many ways. He witnesses that his family doesn’t miss him as a person or even miss his income that much. While they are forced to get jobs, they even become transformed and seem stronger and more independent as the story progresses. His father becomes bolder and stronger and emerges as a leader, culminating in him authoritatively removing the lodgers from their house. His sister goes from being a naive girl who takes care of Gregor to one with a job and the one who first speaks up about the fact that Gregor seems to be holding her back. At the end of the book, she is shown to have gone from being a young girl to a mature young lady, and she is ready to find a husband. These transformations suggest that even before Gregor turned into a bug, he was holding the rest of the family back. Gregor thinks he is important to the family because of his ability to earn money for them and provide them with a leisurely lifestyle, but in reality he is not only being exploited but also preventing the others in his family from reaching their potential
Gregor’s sense of responsibility and purpose seems to get shredded throughout the story. His father repeatedly drives him back into the room at the end of part 1 and again at the end of part 2, asserting his authority over Gregor as the leader of the family. Not only does his father get stronger and more authoritative, but even his sister who he like and was saving money for becomes stronger and self sufficient to some degree. Gregor doesn’t even have the satisfaction of knowing that without his work the family was struggling, instead they seem to be thriving in terms of mental and physical health, even if they have some extra work to do. Ultimately, his family seems to be better off than the start of the book after Gregor’s death, which shows that Gregor was not only being held hostage and exploited by his family, but that his family didn’t even necessarily need the support he provided.
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While his family does seem to better off in term of the fact that they're now inter-dependent at the novel's end, I'm not sure it's fair to say they didn't need the support he provided. As long as Gregor was human, they depended on him for everything because they were lazy, and because Gregor seemed willing to provide for them. It took a traumatic experience such as Gregor's transformation to get them out of that groove, and realize that they would need to provide for something. I'm not sure that if Gregor just one day upped and stopped helping out his family if they'd be able to function or even survive, because they'd still be in their general ways of laziness and unaccountability. It took an incident with a high shock factor to change the way they did things, and I'm not sure that just the departure of Gregor would cause them to change their ways.
ReplyDeleteIt really does seem that the family was providing Gregor with a false sense of purpose while he was in human form. There's never really any reason for them to to rely on Gregor but the fact that they do gives him some pride to know that he is needed to provide. When he turns into a bug its as if the rest of his family had just returned from a long vacation and are forced to pick up the work that had to be finished. It's unfair to Gregor tho because this means while he was working day in and out, the people he was working for were just sitting back and relaxing. This isn't a healthy family environment and I can see how Gregor's sense of purpose can easily go into question.
ReplyDeleteI do think that to some degree the father was definitely using Gregor, because not only was he not working, but he was making Gregor pay off his debts. And because of that Gregor became exploited by the work system and became more and more insect-like. I would think that his own father would also end up like this eventually, but because his father won't be the sole provider in the family, I don't think this will end up being a problem.
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