The Metamorphosis question

I read it when I was younger and I was just getting better after a few years of depression. I remember thinking that I felt like a roach, just like the main character when I was depressed, unable to get up, craving sugar, and feeling miserable. It has been years since I read it but I remember that in the end the sister has changed too and she goes on to have a life. I now feel like that's what the book is about: all the metamorphosis humans undergo through life for better or worse.

From my point of view, what is interesting about this story is that even Gregor woke up as a bug, he doesn' t seem to care about his actual situation, but he only worries about what his family would think for him and in the end he feels guilty (as almost every Kafka' s hero) and deserving what he is passing through (sorry for my english).

What did you think about it? I found it really interesting and revealing if you imagine Gregor as someone with a mental illness or bad injury that all of a sudden has manifested, like if he was bedridden for the rest of his life. His family is ashamed of him all of a sudden as something has happened to him, and he is hidden from guests at the house. I found the family still very mean to someone who they'd loved and who sacrificed everything for them.

I know this thread is from 2021 so sorry if this is coming too late, but I just finished the book and I have so many thoughts about it. One, how he wakes up and his only thought despite being a bug is that he needs to go to work. I felt that. I get that the story is about family relationships and how people treat people who are no longer 'useful' but all I could think at the beginning was how many times I have woken up sick or hungover and still attempted to power through.
Onto his family, what really rubbed me the wrong way was how at first, he was the only one to work in the family. He is the sole provider keeping them afloat. Yet the moment he changes, not only does the father only react with violence, but each and every other family member goes out and gets a job. That seemed so insidious to me, how he was forced to work to exhaustion and at the expense of his quality of life and was discarded so quickly after the fact. It seemed to me that all he was was a paycheck to his family.
Again, sorry for replying to an old discussion.

The books starts to makes more and more sense when you further read the works and life of kafka

I kind of leave it/couldn't finish it, because that absurdive style of approach to writing is just not my cup ot tea. Although, there's some important life lessons about how childhood trauma is able to contol your adult life and perception of things-that parallel with Kaska's father parent attitude is really impactful and makes you think about ourselves insecurities and its influence on our beloved ones..

To understand this book, I think it is important to understand Franz Kafka's life, and most revealingly, he was eventually taken to an insane asylum.
I believe he wrote this book before its time, and contemporary audiences can appreciate it more. Discussion from critics describes Gregor's metamorphosis as an allegory of social constructs or a physical representation of mental illness. Either is fascinating, but to appreciate the depth of the allegory or the metaphor, I think the best thing is to look at what critics say.

I'm rereading this book right now. I was not impressed with my first read but I think that's because I didn't fully understand what I was reading. Now I think I'm enjoying it a bit more and realizing there is more depth to the storyline than meets the eye.

I read this book a few years ago; I recently re-read it- it's the type of book that lingers in your mind for a while after you finish it.

There are many ways (in my opinion) to view this book: for some, it's about disability; for others, it's about depression; for someone else, it may be about having a parasitic or abusive family. What I think is universal about any (reasonable) interpretation of this work is the idea of bleakness: the feeling that things have changed permanently; the weird shift in how others treat you; for something that may not even be within your control; the sheer ridiculousness of your situation. It's that exact absurdity that Kafka captures perfectly by transforming Gregor into an insect/vermin: on paper, it seems ridiculous, however, is it any more absurd or unexpected than someone just going about their day, and then having a brain aneurysm that makes them completely disabled, or someone perfectly sane having a psychotic break?

That's what makes this book so good for me.

I read this book when i was 26 and it took a lot of effort to realize what's it about. It just tells us how human behaviour changes with time and unconditional love is rare to find. Its a book that shows the reality of the society and nothing is good or bad.

Read it.Loved it.We are what we offer or are able to offer others.Take that away and you are just a bug.

Ive just read this for the first time at the age of 35. For me, this was a real odd ball. I found it to have pretty good pacing so was able to read it fairly quickly. I think the subliminal messaging is really obvious in this book. For me, this was so obviously about how you people can experience being treated differently/poorly, the moment they change. I gave it 4/5