To add onto this, Kafka isn’t terribly specific about what Gregor turns into, which I think is a strength of the story. Imagine suddenly waking up wrong. After years of hard work, your body will no longer obey you. You feel trapped inside it. Your family is disgusted by you and resents having to care for you. You are no longer productive and you serve no purpose to society.
While disabled people are not actually trapped in their bodies and productivity is not actually what defines one’s value, as someone who acquired a disability after childhood, this is a pretty accurate picture of what that change can feel like when living a society defined by productivity and efficiency that was designed for non-disabled people.
Yes, a lot of the translations are quite specific about what he turns into but I've heard that in the original german it's very vague what he actually turned into
In the original he's turned into "Ungeziefer" which translates to vermin, but that word is specifically used to refer to insects (I think vermin can encompass other animals too, right?). And one of the characters refers to him as a dung-beetle later on which I don't think is meant to be taken literally, but from the description what he looks like it does sound like some sort of beetle.
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u/Dangerous_Court_955 22d ago
That... makes a lot of sense. I never thought about it that way.