The third-person narrator occupies intimate access to Samsa’s inner thoughts, and draws us into Samsa’s alienation from the rest of the world. In Kafka’s Narrators, Roy Pascal indicates that “almost everything we know is passed on to us via the consciousness of Gregor” (Pascal 32). The narrator’s point of view turns this strange, uncanny experience into one that is also deeply subjective, further alienating Samsa from external reality. Samsa’s conflicting thoughts and actions - prompted by his experience with the uncanny- underline the nightmarish metamorphosis that alienates him from the experience of normal everyday life.

The presence of the unfamiliar is intrusive and unavoidable in his familiar world. He closes his eyes “so as to not have to watch his wriggling legs,” and diverts his attention to his “exhausting profession” (Kafka 88), only to be once again faced with his grotesque physicality. Amidst this state of oddity and uncertainty, Samsa copes comically with the physical toil of being a monstrous insect while simultaneously devising plans for work as though he were in a fit state to go. The transformation alienates Samsa as he is forced to accept his new body without elucidation. Samsa asks, “What’s the matter with me?” as he looks around at his “normal human room,” with strange nonchalance, acknowledging both the unknown and the commonplace in the same train of thought (Kafka 87). Thus Samsa’s bizarre, otherworldly metamorphosis occurs within the context of normal life.

In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud asserts that beyond describing something mysterious that “evokes fear and dread,” the uncanny represents a particular psychological experience created in the relationship between the unfamiliar and the familiar (Freud 132). The aesthetic concept of the “uncanny” often found in German art and literature is integral to the story of Samsa’s metamorphosis and alienation from the world. Gregor Samsa’s estrangement from the world, his family, and himself is established through both the operation of the uncanny in an otherwise naturalistic setting and through a narrator whose ambiguous realm of perception alternates between proximity and distance to the protagonist. In his famous story “Metamorphosis,” Kafka presents the story of a young man inexplicably transformed into a bug. Sokel describes Kafka’s world as “an enigmatic dream universe, obeying the laws of the dream but not spelling them out” (Sokel 45). Known for investigating the problem of modern alienation is Franz Kafka, the troubled young man whose nightmarish modernism manipulates form and style with such peculiarity that he hardly fits with his contemporaries in any one category. At a time of economic and social decline, artists and writers often depicted estranged and uncertain worlds.

The subject of alienation surfaces frequently in twentieth-century writing.

Samsa metamorphosis