Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and the Beginning of the End—the Death Anonymous College

“Well, … listen, you don’t have to worry about getting rid of that stuff in the next room. It’s all been taken care of” (503). With indifference and a sigh of relief, the charwoman marked an official resignation of Gregor Samsa from his own life—a traveling salesman who had turned into a centipede, in Franz Kafka’s short story The Metamorphosis. Yet, one brutal truth that human endeavors to often ignore in the notion of life and death is that death, rather than being a spontaneous incident, operates in the way that it requires a gradual process which human beings spend their lifetime getting to know, from the moment they were born. With that notion in mind, it is inevitable to revisit the portrayal of Gregor’s life, and to notify that his death is not marked by an attempt from the charwoman to get rid of his corpse, but by his transformation from a human-figure to a vermin-figure. That being said, Gregor Samsa as a natural human being had died before he woke up noticing his “vaulted belly partitioned by arching ridges” and his “wriggling legs” (Kafka 471-472)

In the absurdity of the fact that a man can turn into a cockroach after one night, Kafka provided a detailed picture of Gregor’s life before the event, in which the...