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.
The thing about his father, though, is that he is maintaining a healthy level of skepticism about the whole ordeal. He doesn't know that Gregor is really Gregor inside of the bug. He doesn't know that Gregor won't "go feral" or anything like that. Unfortunately, the way he goes about his suspicion does drag the family down (though, note that Grete has less time for Gregor because she has a job now to support the family and by extension Gregor). In fact, it becomes pretty much self-fulfilling, as his treatment of Gregor degrades him to a point where Gregor will hiss and make a fuss, peer out of his room in front of the boarders, and other naughtinesses. I don't think the way his father treated him was right, but at least his motivation wasn't necessary wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that Gregor's father doesn't, rationally, seem all that menacing (and this has to do in part with the ambiguous weak/strong descriptions we get of him), but this is actually suited to the heavily Freudian/psychological bent of the story: it's not about how Gregor's father "really" is; it has everything to do with how Gregor *sees* him. He looms large in Gregor's consciousness, and he's deeply afraid of disappointing the father anyway. The father's physical menace has an air of absurdity to it (his "weapons" being a newspaper and a basket of apples), just as his uniform manages to convey both authority (he wears it around the house, now!) AND subservience (he's a *bank messenger*, not a cop or soldier). Gregor has this "outsized" sense of his father's menace--and this suits the psychology of the story, and the generally hyperbolic sense we get of all the characters.
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