And, hauntingly, Gregor and Georg each carries out his own sentence. The adult child—another of Kafka’s fusions of different states—is little prepared for the world. Even Eduard Raban’s fantasy of splitting into two selves in “Wedding Preparations” is a child’s attempt at evasion: “Can’t I do it the way I always used to as a child in matters that were dangerous?” (Complete Stories, p. 55). The answer to Raban’s question is no. Kafka’s characters, regardless of how much agency they possess, are doomed to fail. As Kafka writes in “A Message from the Emperor,” the messenger’s arrival “could never, ever happen” (p. 3).

If we think of Gregor as having a child’s mentality, it is natural to sympathize with him—especially if we see him as trapped in the role of family provider. This sympathy is not altogether different from what we feel toward Dickens’s Oliver Twist, that supreme victim of child labor. Yet this sympathy does not hold, for it is always followed by a repulsion toward Gregor’s physical ity: “A brown fluid had come from his mouth, oozed over the key, and dripped onto the floor” (p. 16). Kafka further complicates matters by writing “The Metamorphosis” in the third person. This mode of narration allows for Gregor’s death at the end, which confirms definitively that the metamorphosis was not a hallucination or a dream. But though the narrative follows Gregor’s awareness, we always have enough room to reevaluate how we feel about him.

Some of our sympathy falls to the sister, and even to the feeble parents—none of whom are fit to work. But ultimately we remain loyal to Gregor, especially because his family forsakes him. His sister stops tending to him (p. 40) and locks him in his room (p. 48); his mother faints upon seeing an enormous insect clinging to the wall (p. 33); the father, in brief, subjects him to every abuse imaginable. At the expense of Gregor’s sacrifice, the sister, at the end of the story, stretches her arrogant body and gets the liberation Gregor longed for. Under Gregor’s care first, and then her parents’, the sister enjoys a healthy childhood, one leading to physical and mental development, and one in which she isn’t trapped. Yet our loyalty to Gregor extends even beyond his death, and his sister’s cheery success story offers but a bitter pill.

In the pivotal scene of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor’s sister begins to play her violin. Listening to her music, Gregor “felt as though the path to his unknown hungers was being cleared” (p. 44). We have no indication that Gregor Samsa enjoyed music while he was human; his intention to send his sister to the Conservatory was to him a financial endeavor, an investment in her future. Yet to be moved by music is essentially human; it reflects sensitivity. The life Gregor led as a human being left no room for this kind of appreciation. But, by regressing into an animal, his sensibility has become refined rather than coarsened. As vermin he comes closer to a spiritual liberation, of which human beings at their best are capable. Perhaps in death Gregor attains salvation, the ultimate metamorphosis.