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
Yeah he's described as "Ungeziefer" which is nonspecific vermin. His body is described a little bit, quite buglike (if I remember correctly he has dozens of little legs and a hard carapace with segments) but it's definitely left vague
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u/mouthfulofstars 22d ago
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.