Gregor’s family are assholes! I really can’t get over how terrible they are. Gregor just sits around in his room for months, and they just leave him there. It’s disgusting. At the beginning of the section, I thought his sister might gradually warm up to him, as she seems to be trying to be nice. She gets him milk, his favorite beverage, but as time passes, it appears that she just gives him food out of necessity. She is incredibly disgusted whenever she sees him. She literally can’t stand the sight of him, and he is so damned nice as an insect. He realizes he disgusts her, so he spends four hours positioning a blanket over himself. Four hours! When his mom decides to go see him, she collapses upon seeing him, and he feels guilty. Ridiculous! Then his dad comes home and gets mad at Gregor.
This section leads me to believe that Kafka had one terrible family life. There is nothing ok with how Gregor’s family behaves. I am also incredibly confused as to why Gregor wants to help them. Why does he care about them? They suck. They aren’t supportive or understanding. There is no sympathy at all. They seem upset that he somehow became a bug. His father is mad that they no longer have a source of income. His mother is just upset by the whole ordeal.
Most importantly, his family refuses to treat him like a person. They never address him. They don’t try to find out how much of him remains in the bug. They just like him in his room. They have no clue his mind is still as it was because they don’t bother to explore this and find it out. They also don’t try to remedy Gregor’s problem. The mother and father don’t try to find a cure. In any other book, if this happened, I would expect the parents to try everything they could, like reading up on the subject or approaching “mystics.” Not here though. They just lock him up. Assholes.
1 comment:
While their behavior is both infuriating and, in some weird way, understandable (given that there is no visible/audible evidence of Gregor's humanity--or even any certain indication that this *is* Gregor), the Samsa family's "assholery" can be seen as one more "absurdist" aspect of the novel (in light of your previous entry). They resemble familiar dynamics that many readers unfortunately can relate to, but the whole picture is filtered through a dreamlike distortion--they aren't "characters" so much as projections of Gregor's own tormented psychology. It's like we can't quite say anything about them as people, because we're always seeing them through the lens of what they've turned Gregor into. And he's such a willing participant in his abjection (an "enabler" of their abuse).
Post a Comment