Exploring The Metamorphosis: A Perspective Beyond Gregor
Transformation is often imagined as something poetic, something endowed with purpose. But what of the changes that bring only ruin? What about the slow unraveling, the spaces left behind, and the silence that settles like dust?
For a recent humanities course, I was assigned to write a passage from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—not through Gregor’s eyes, but from the perspective of someone left in the wake of his transformation. I chose to give a voice to his sister, Grete, who has watched a beloved brother slip into something unrecognizable in form and in spirit.
This passage explores grief as a shattering event, a creeping inevitability, a quiet decay that lingers in the corners of a home once filled with warmth. The theme is one of helplessness, of love fraying under the weight of something that cannot be understood or undone. More than horror, it is sorrow that pervades the words—the agony of witnessing, of reaching for someone who is already gone.
In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s story unfolds in isolation, but the echoes of his transformation shape those around him. His family’s responses shift from pity to resentment, from duty to rejection. My take on this passage leans into that shifting dynamic, capturing the turmoil of love caught between devotion and self-preservation.
What remains when a person becomes something else? When the past lingers like a shadow, and the future demands you move forward? These are the questions at the heart of the piece below.
Grete’s Lament
By: Kristine Starling
Gregor once held our family together, steady and unshaken by life’s tempests. Now, that foundation crumbles, leaving something neither man nor beast in its place—something I do not have the strength to name. Pale light spills into the corners of our home at dawn, but it offers no comfort. Instead, it sharpens the shadows, stretches them long across the walls, and forces me to face the truth—I no longer recognize my brother.
He once walked upright and carried the burdens of our household. Now, he lingers in darkness, skulking unseen, a wretched specter that casts its pall over us all. I have tried. Gods, I have tried. I have brought him food, whispered through the door, clung to the tattered remnants of the boy I once adored. But each day, he slips further from my grasp.
His twisted, grotesque form is not the worst of it. The silence is. That dreadful, empty silence settles between us like dust on forgotten furniture. He is not only lost to us; he is losing himself. But life does not wait for grief to pass nor offer refuge to those who linger in sorrow. We must endure. We must scrape together what remains and push forward, even if it means turning our backs on what once was.
Gregor, you haunt us. Your presence stains this house, filling its corners with the whisper of something neither living nor dead. And so, I must let you go. Not out of cruelty, not out of anger, but out of desperate hope—for something resembling peace, for a future that does not begin and end with this horror.
Gregor, is there forgiveness in this? Can you find it in your heart if a heart still beats within you? I do not know. But I know this: survival is no longer enough. We must reclaim who we once were or lose ourselves forever in the abyss of despair.
