Gregor's Father

One of the lines that struck me about Gregor's family was describing the way Gregor gives his paycheck to them: "They had just gotten used to it, the family as well as Gregor, the money was received with thanks and given with pleasure, but no special feeling of warmth went with it any more." It goes on to illustrate the way Gregor remains close to his sister, which is obvious in the way his sister initially cares for him. However, even his sister isn't really appreciated by the parents, later being called mostly useless.

The father is especially interesting because Gregor seems to be afraid of him, but in his current state he seems kind of harmless -- apparently he's gotten so fat that he walks really slowly and takes hours for breakfast. Nonetheless he is always the aggressor -- his sister cares for him and his mother is pretty concerned but his father keeps hitting him with canes and apples. Gregor hates his job but has been working at it for five years and planned to for five more years -- is it completely out of love for his family? Providing for his mother & sister seems to be kind of the carrot whereas his father is more the stick -- the manager represents being fired, but the manager literally runs away from Gregor when he sees the insect, while his father's response to the crisis is to be reduced to kind of an animal himself, what with his hissing & beating Gregor. The narrator remarks: "he was an old man who had not worked for the past five years and who in any case could not be expected to undertake too much; during these five years, which were the first vacation of his hard-working yet unsuccessful life, he had gained a lot of weight and as a result had become fairly sluggish." On one hand this makes him seem kind of harmless -- he was unsuccessful and fairly sluggish -- but he's also the kind of guy who doesn't take any vacations, which isn't always a sign of a pleasant person.

I think it's interesting that the father kind of ends up dragging the rest of the family down to his level with regard to Gregor. He always took a tack of ignore it, and if you can't, attack it -- no love in that. Grete takes care not only to keep Gregor alive but to ensure his happiness, and his mother wants to see his room and is willing to undertake hard work to remove the furniture in order to make it nicer for him (although one of the saddest lines is her's about how maybe they should just leave everything like it is so when everything returns to normal it'll be like nothing ever happened). With the father's apple thing, everyone starts basically ignoring Gregor, and even Gregor loses his love -- he doesn't make excuses for his family anymore and takes to outright hissing at them when he's displeased, while the father wears his bank uniform, where he works the lowliest job, in a kind of proud way, which is in its own way pretty sad for him.

Cycles

I found the end of The Sun Also Rises interesting, if not particularly satisfying, although none of the novels we've read really have particularly satisfying endings (I remember some people not being happy about the ending of Mrs. Dalloway). Mrs. Dalloway I think was sort of a peek into someone else's life, but it felt like Clarissa's life was much more "stable." If people's lives go in little cycles until they break out of them, Clarissa's seemed small and settled, whereas Jake had a sort of big cycle in the book -- completed with the bookends of the cab ride. Maybe some people find a sort of routine life depressing, but I thought Jake's story was really sad. He seemed happiest alone but he kept getting dragged back to Brett -- honestly, I don't blame Brett that much... I'm not sure you can really blame anyone in something like that, although it sounds a bit like an abusive relationship. It feels like a more depressing version of those TV shows where nothing ever changes from episode to episode -- you get a new sort of case, tensions escalate, but everything is back to normal at the end. Sometimes it feels like the writers are afraid to change anything and maybe that's what Jake feels -- he goes with the drama and the bullfighters but at the end of the day, Paris is comforting, and his relationship with Brett might be in a way comforting. He likes Brett, Brett likes him, he understands the troubles that come with that relationship. And they both know they will both come back to each other -- even after the fiasco with Cohn and then Romero, Brett is confident that she can write to Jake and he will answer, and of course Jake does, and the cycle, with the climax and the return to normalcy, will start again.

Maybe this is a bit depressing so here's a picture of Hemingway and a cat (Blogger is not cooperating with my multimedia dreams).