Food: it’s what’s for dinner. And breakfast, and lunch. Supper. Second breakfast. Elevenses. Afternoon tea. Dessert!

I suspect we can all relate to the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. They think in a way that we consider acceptable: they love home, and peace and quiet, and friends and family, and food. (Also beer and smoking a “pipeweed” that seems not to be tobacco, exactly… But those are less commonly accepted habits. Still not the worst habits to have, though.) J.R.R. Tolkien used these qualities to make the hobbits relatable because that served to present part of his message to his audience: he wanted people to understand that single individuals, even the smallest and least significant people, can change the world, if they act with courage and honor and loyalty. Not a subtle man, he made the “smallest” literal, and the evil the hobbits fought against as monstrous and demonic as he possibly could. Subtle or not, though, he was right on the money with his ideas on how his audience would feel about the hobbits; and Peter Jackson, bless his heart, was able to capture the same feeling in the movies. And right at the heart of that affection we all feel for the hobbits is food. They love it, we love it. Even when we’re a bit stupid about it, such as when Merry and Pippin steal from Farmer Maggot, or when Sam joins the other two in cooking at night on the side of Weathertop, broadcasting their location to the Nazgul. Of course they don’t think about the consequences of getting or making food: they’re hungry. As someone who has eaten garbage like weeks-old bagels, month-old popcorn, and years-old candy, I can relate.

But the more impressive task that Tolkien and Jackson both tried to accomplish, and I think did accomplish, is creating sympathy for another character who is not cute, who is not friendly, who is not relatable (at least not in the same way), and who does not eat sausages and tomatoes and nice crispy bacon and, most famously, PO-TAY-TOES like a hobbit: Gollum.

Gollum is everything the hobbits are not: he is disgusting to look at, with his stringy hair and his stringy body that he twists into impossible postures, with his broken teeth and twisted features, with his disturbing voice and mannerisms. He is selfish where the hobbits are generous, untrustworthy where they are loyal — evil where they are good. Most importantly, Gollum eats disgusting things, when he eats at all. His preferred meal is fish, which he likes “raw and wrrrrrrrriggling,” as he tells Sam Gamgee. There is more than one moment when Gollum is shown eating fish in a particularly animalistic and disgusting way; one scene that sticks with me is when the film is showing the origins of Gollum, and gives us a slow-motion close-up of Gollum’s rotten teeth sinking into a whole, raw fish, with water — or saliva? Maybe just slime? Which is the most disgusting? — bursting out of it, oozing over his discolored lips and gums. Gives me the cold shivers every time.

Which is, of course, the intent. We are supposed to be disgusted and appalled and horrified by Gollum, first viscerally, and then as the story reaches its climax in Mount Doom, morally and spiritually. But that is not so that we can hate Gollum, because Gollum is not the villain: Gollum is the victim. We are meant to pity Gollum. Gandalf, who knows all, points this out to Frodo in the Mines of Moria: 

Frodo: ‘It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill Gollum when he had the chance.’

Gandalf: ‘Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death and judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play in it, for good or evil, before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.’

And, indeed, it does: when Frodo falls victim to the same corruption that twisted Gollum, it is Gollum’s own corruption that saves the day, that leads to the destruction of the Ring, and Gollum’s own destruction. And it is those same rotten teeth, his willingness to eat what should not be eaten, that allows him to take the evil away from Frodo, while sparing Frodo’s life: by biting off Frodo’s ring finger, Gollum saves him from sharing in Gollum’s fate. If Bilbo had not pitied Gollum, if Frodo had not repeated that same generous response to the vile Gollum and also spared Gollum’s life as Bilbo had done — and if Gollum had not been willing to eat (or at least bite) part of Frodo — then Gollum would not have made it to Mount Doom and taken the Ring, and not only would Frodo have been lost, but the world might have been lost as well, since the Nazgul were at that moment winging their way to the volcano to retrieve their master’s property.

We are to feel sorry for Gollum, who was destroyed by the corruption of the true villain, Sauron and his Ring of Power (Another un-subtle symbol, which simply represents: power. The power that corrupts.). It is not Gollum’s fault that the Ring destroyed him, and so we should not hate him for that; we should pity him for being destroyed. Tolkien gives us some help with that, through the depiction of Smeagol, the hobbit that Gollum once was (and all the associations with the beloved hobbits that come with that history), and the depiction of the beloved character Bilbo’s similar corruption, particularly the moment in Rivendell when he tries to take the Ring from Frodo, and in Peter Jackson’s movie, Bilbo’s face for a moment takes on Gollum’s features (Notice the teeth).

But for the most part, Tolkien makes it very, very difficult to pity Gollum, because he is disgusting, because he is contemptuous, because he is vile. And that’s the point: the people who most deserve and need our pity are the people who are most difficult to pity. They are the ones we find disgusting, contemptuous, even vile. Though Tolkien understands our struggle, and gives us a voice through Sam Gamgee and his hatred of Gollum (and the mini-victories Sam wins when he is proven right by Gollum’s betrayal, and when he gets to beat up Gollum, on three separate occasions), he insists that we find it in ourselves to sympathize with the creature: because that is what is required to defeat evil. Pity for those who are hardest to pity is the only way for good to win. Everything the hobbits are is necessary: their courage and generosity and loyalty, even their smallness, are all vital as well; but the pity for the unpitiable is the last requirement. We must find the way to treat Gollum with dignity and respect, no matter what. We must.

Another author, another story, that makes the same argument, and makes it, if anything, even more difficult, is Franz Kafka’s classic story The Metamorphosis. In it, the relatable and even admirable human Gregor Samsa becomes a disgusting, contemptible, vile creature, generally depicted as an insect, but only named as “ein ungeheuer Ungeziefer,” an unclean vermin that is “unfit for sacrifice.” Essentially, something that is too disgusting to eat, if we take sacrifice as the ancients did, in the sense that the sacrifice provides food for the gods. And just like J.R.R. Tolkien, Kafka insists that the reader pity this unpitiable man: that we find a way to see him as a man, as worthy of our sympathy and our love, no matter what.

Just as Gollum is introduced to us first as the creature, and only later as Smeagol the hobbit, Gregor is transformed into his monstrous self in the novel’s very first sentence: “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin (“ein ungeheuer Ungeziefer,” that is).” No explanation for this transformation is ever given, or even guessed at; Gregor himself spends that first morning worrying about being late to work, and how his family will survive if he loses his job — a real question, as Gregor is the only wage-earner for his family of four. But still, one would think that the most prominent thought in the mind of a person who just turned into a cockroach would be something along the lines of “Hey — I just turned into a cockroach. Wonder how that happened?” That is not Gregor’s main thought, and part of the reason Kafka wrote him that way has to be so that he remains relatable, even while he is apparently in the body of an insect: here’s a man who wakes up annoyed because he slept through his alarm, and because he has to go to work; who doesn’t like his job, and doesn’t feel fulfilled. Just like so many of us. He just also happens to be an unclean vermin, for some reason or other.  

Regardless of what happened or how it happened, the important fact in the story is that Gregor is now disgusting. He is unacceptable. When he emerges from his room, the other people — or perhaps I should just say “the people” — react with horror and revulsion:

He had first to slowly turn himself around one of the double doors, and he had to do it very carefully if he did not want to fall flat on his back before entering the room. He was still occupied with this difficult movement, unable to pay attention to anything else, when he heard the chief clerk exclaim a loud “Oh!”, which sounded like the soughing of the wind. Now he also saw him – he was the nearest to the door – his hand pressed against his open mouth and slowly retreating as if driven by a steady and invisible force. Gregor’s mother, her hair still dishevelled from bed despite the chief clerk’s being there, looked at his father. Then she unfolded her arms, took two steps forward towards Gregor and sank down onto the floor into her skirts that spread themselves out around her as her head disappeared down onto her breast. His father looked hostile, and clenched his fists as if wanting to knock Gregor back into his room. Then he looked uncertainly round the living room, covered his eyes with his hands and wept so that his powerful chest shook.

The chief clerk (come to Gregor’s home from his employer to see why Gregor had not arrived at work on time, and to be honest, I find that much more bothersome than the giant insect) shows a gesture of disgust and nausea; Gregor’s mother faints, his father weeps. Perhaps this is not exactly what the audience does when we first see Gollum — but imagine how Gollum’s family would have reacted to him.

As the story goes on, Gregor is given a number of traits that show him first as inhuman — from the rest of that first paragraph, which includes: “He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections”, and, “His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked” — and then as disgusting, when, at the height of his strangeness, he starts crawling over the walls and ceiling, which habit is detected because “he had, after all, left traces of the adhesive from his feet as he crawled about.” Gregor makes us most uncomfortable, seems the most alien, when he presses himself against a framed picture on his wall to keep his family from taking it away from him, for which we are given the strangely inappropriate description “He hurried up onto the picture and pressed himself against its glass, it held him firmly and felt good on his hot belly. This picture at least, now totally covered by Gregor, would certainly be taken away by no-one.” His mother collapses in a faint after seeing “the enormous brown patch against the flowers of the wallpaper.” Gregor has been reduced to a stain, a patch of dirt; still, he is so upsetting that his mother can’t bear to look at him even though she loves him and has hope that he will somehow return to his former state — a redemption that Gollum is also offered through the recovery of his Smeagol personality, though of course, Smeagol is physically no less disgusting than Gollum, and his short time onscreen is soon ended when the Gollum-self returns and takes over once more, and for all his remaining time.

But never is Gregor so disgusting as when he eats. Gregor is first given food after his first shocking emergence; he is driven back into his room by his father, who actually wounds Gregor (and gives us the rather upsetting description “One side of his body lifted itself, he lay at an angle in the doorway, one flank scraped on the white door and was painfully injured, leaving vile brown flecks on it, soon he was stuck fast and would not have been able to move at all by himself, the little legs along one side hung quivering in the air while those on the other side were pressed painfully against the ground.” Nonetheless his father is pitiless: “Then his father gave him a hefty shove from behind which released him from where he was held and sent him flying, and heavily bleeding, deep into his room.”), and it is not until late that evening that Gregor’s sister, Grete, tries to reach out to her brother with food.

Her first attempt is bread soaked in milk, a common food for children and invalids, and one of Gregor’s favorites. At least it used to be.

By the door there was a dish filled with sweetened milk with little pieces of white bread floating in it. He was so pleased he almost laughed, as he was even hungrier than he had been that morning, and immediately dipped his head into the milk, nearly covering his eyes with it. But he soon drew his head back again in disappointment; not only did the pain in his tender left side make it difficult to eat the food – he was only able to eat if his whole body worked together as a snuffling whole – but the milk did not taste at all nice. Milk like this was normally his favourite drink, and his sister had certainly left it there for him because of that, but he turned, almost against his own will, away from the dish and crawled back into the centre of the room.

Shoving his face into the milk up to his eyes is not a great image; but it almost has a silliness to it that makes it acceptable, even close to funny. Not so Grete’s second attempt to provide for her brother (after she first disposes of the uneaten milquetoast, “using a rag, not her bare hands”):

In order to test his taste, she brought him a whole selection of things, all spread out on an old newspaper. There were old, half-rotten vegetables; bones from the evening meal, covered in white sauce that had gone hard; a few raisins and almonds; some cheese that Gregor had declared inedible two days before; a dry roll and some bread spread with butter and salt. As well as all that she had poured some water into the dish, which had probably been permanently set aside for Gregor’s use, and placed it beside them.

One attempt to offer Gregor his favorite food; and then it’s straight to garbage. But it seems to have been a good choice, as Gregor finally digs in:

“Am I less sensitive than I used to be, then?”, he thought, and was already sucking greedily at the cheese which had immediately, almost compellingly, attracted him much more than the other foods on the newspaper. Quickly one after another, his eyes watering with pleasure, he consumed the cheese, the vegetables and the sauce; the fresh foods, on the other hand, he didn’t like at all, and even dragged the things he did want to eat a little way away from them because he couldn’t stand the smell.

Once more, the leftovers are, for Grete, untouchable — corrupted:

“[H]is sister unselfconsciously took a broom and swept up the left-overs, mixing them in with the food he had not even touched at all as if it could not be used any more. She quickly dropped it all into a bin, closed it with its wooden lid, and carried everything out.”

Another trend continues as well: that Gregor is not to be seen. His first attempt to emerge from his room is met with horror and violence (And perhaps it is unimportant, but since my topic is food, that first time his mother faints, she falls onto the breakfast table and knocks over the coffee pot; Gregor, in response, “could not help himself snapping in the air with his jaws at the sight of the flow of coffee.” So maybe it is not a matter of his new self being incapable of eating proper human food.), and immediately afterwards, the doors that had locked the family out of Gregor’s room are now locked to keep him in what has become his prison. Even there, Gregor finds a hiding place for whenever his sister, and then later his mother or the cleaning woman, come into his room: he goes under the couch, and lest they spy even a small part of him, he takes the sheet from his bed and drapes it over the couch as a privacy curtain. Gregor’s safe space gets smaller and smaller. Whenever he does emerge from it, he suffers terribly: after his mother faints when she sees the large brown patch on the wall, Grete leaves the room to get smelling salts, and Gregor, horrified at what he has caused, follows her: he startles her, and she drops a bottle of medicine, cutting Gregor’s face with a shard of glass and splashing caustic liquid on him, as well. She then rushes back into the room and locks Gregor out — the usurpation of Gregor’s once-secure space is now complete  — and Gregor, panicking, crawls all over the walls and ceiling in one of his most insect-like moments, and then collapses — atop the dining table. It’s hard to know if the point here is that Gregor is at maximum visibility, and therefore at his most unacceptable, or if Kafka is making explicit what is only implied: that Gregor himself, while he may now be an unclean vermin unworthy of sacrifice, has up until now been sacrificed — devoured — by his family, who have lived off of his work and his suffering, who have absorbed his kindness and generosity without giving any in return. Perhaps Gregor transforms into an unclean vermin as a defense mechanism: they alienate and abuse him, but at least they no longer consume him.

Whatever the meaning of Gregor’s collapse atop the dining table, the real danger in this moment comes home with Gregor’s father. The proud patriarch had been fading away, his authority reduced along with his income, his power apparently transferring to his son when Gregor became the sole breadwinner. He still had influence: it is he who decides that breakfast should be extensive: “The washing up from breakfast lay on the table; there was so much of it because, for Gregor’s father, breakfast was the most important meal of the day and he would stretch it out for several hours as he sat reading a number of different newspapers.” (Is it petty to note that breakfast is a meal Gregor, who wakes at 4am to get a 5am train to work, is sure to miss every day?) and much of the family’s daily life revolves around him; but he himself had grown weaker. Not any more. As his son becomes incapacitated, the elder Samsa regains his former power, and now when he arrives home, Grete runs to him for help in this crisis, and the father goes to deal with his son:

He took his cap, with its gold monogram from, probably, some bank, and threw it in an arc right across the room onto the sofa, put his hands in his trouser pockets, pushing back the bottom of his long uniform coat, and, with look of determination, walked towards Gregor. He probably did not even know himself what he had in mind, but nonetheless lifted his feet unusually high. Gregor was amazed at the enormous size of the soles of his boots, but wasted no time with that – he knew full well, right from the first day of his new life, that his father thought it necessary to always be extremely strict with him.

That last sentence is questionable, at least where Gregor ascribes his father’s strictness to his new situation post-metamorphosis; after all, this is our first introduction to Gregor’s father:

[S]oon his father came knocking at one of the side doors, gently, but with his fist. “Gregor, Gregor”, he called, “what’s wrong?” And after a short while he called again with a warning deepness in his voice: “Gregor! Gregor!” At the other side door his sister came plaintively: “Gregor? Aren’t you well? Do you need anything?” Gregor answered to both sides: “I’m ready, now”, making an effort to remove all the strangeness from his voice by enunciating very carefully and putting long pauses between each, individual word. His father went back to his breakfast…

Note, again, the father’s real priority. This scene shows us that Gregor’s words are apparently incomprehensible to other people, so his father seems not to get an answer to his question; but having delivered a warning and heard some kind of response, his work is complete and he goes back to his food. Now, in the later scene, Mr. Samsa is once again not interested in what Gregor has to say, why he is where he is; he just wants to put him back where he belongs. It is impossible to miss his attitude towards his insect son in the way he lifts his feet so high, as if preparing to stomp the bug flat (The first time he chased Gregor back into his room, he did it with a folded newspaper; another anti-bug strategy, it seems.).

But he does not, in fact, stomp on Gregor: instead he attacks his son in a particularly unusual way: with food.

[T]hen, right beside him, lightly tossed, something flew down and rolled in front of him. It was an apple; then another one immediately flew at him; Gregor froze in shock; there was no longer any point in running as his father had decided to bombard him. He had filled his pockets with fruit from the bowl on the sideboard and now, without even taking the time for careful aim, threw one apple after another. These little, red apples rolled about on the floor, knocking into each other as if they had electric motors. An apple thrown without much force glanced against Gregor’s back and slid off without doing any harm. Another one however, immediately following it, hit squarely and lodged in his back; Gregor wanted to drag himself away, as if he could remove the surprising, the incredible pain by changing his position; but he felt as if nailed to the spot and spread himself out, all his senses in confusion.

The most interesting element here is the description of the apples “knocking into each other as if they had electric motors.” It’s hard to know what to make of that. Perhaps the apples represent the essence of the modern, industrial era, nature turned into machinery, turned hollow and cold and efficient — and, of course, inedible. Gregor clearly doesn’t belong in the world of industry, with his reluctance to work himself to death, his general indifference to the conspicuous consumption that signals wealth and prosperity, his anxiety where his pugnacious arrogance should be, the arrogance of a man of business: a man like the chief clerk, and like his father. Gregor is far too apologetic, far too concerned with other people’s happiness, far too willing to sacrifice himself; perhaps that is why he is seen, and sees himself, as something unworthy. It almost feels as though the apples have the right attitude: bustling about, bumping into each other, constantly on the go; they become weapons so easily, turned against one another, against a harmless innocent — because whatever else Gregor may be, unclean, unworthy, unacceptable, he is also harmless. Maybe he is too much like the actual fruit, too little like what they become in his father’s hands.

Then again, if we may see mechanical, electrical fruit, turned from sustenance into a weapon, as corrupt, then perhaps the one whom the fruit represent is not Gregor: but his father. Perhaps this is another depiction of the idea that Tolkien represented with a magic ring: power corrupts. 

After this, the Samsas reach an uneasy sort of truce, with the family paying less and less attention to Gregor, and he, in turn, having a bit more freedom, as they open his doors so that he can observe the family. But he observes them turn even further away from him, focusing in more and more on the father, whose self-centered willingness to be coddled, to be the center of attention, lets him allow his wife and daughter to  literally carry him to bed every night. The family also, more interested in money and in presenting a proper appearance to outsiders, allow those outsiders in, in the form of three renters who move into a spare room in the flat; these three now become yet another focus for the family’s attention and desire to please, yet another person (Because they are clearly a single unit, like a Greek chorus of citizens) who can stand between Gregor and any care his family might offer. Gregor’s sister and mother cook for the renters: they give Gregor more garbage to eat, spending less and less time thinking about whether Gregor is happy and his needs are met, cleaning apathetically and indifferently, clearing away his leftovers without caring if he ate or not. Gregor, roused at last to anger by his treatment at the hands of his family, wishes to return to eating human food, at least as a symbol of his value (though notice that this is only at some times; at other times, in other moods, he still, still, wishes to look after his family):

Other times he was not at all in the mood to look after his family, he was filled with simple rage about the lack of attention he was shown, and although he could think of nothing he would have wanted, he made plans of how he could get into the pantry where he could take all the things he was entitled to, even if he was not hungry.

Garbage, in fact, comes to define Gregor, and his space eventually becomes a storeroom, and then simply a rubbish heap: 

They had got into the habit of putting things into this room that they had no room for anywhere else…many things had become superfluous which, although they could not be sold, the family did not wish to discard. All these things found their way into Gregor’s room. The dustbins from the kitchen found their way in there too. The charwoman was always in a hurry, and anything she couldn’t use for the time being she would just chuck in there. He, fortunately, would usually see no more than the object and the hand that held it. The woman most likely meant to fetch the things back out again when she had time and the opportunity, or to throw everything out in one go, but what actually happened was that they were left where they landed when they had first been thrown unless Gregor made his way through the junk and moved it somewhere else.

Their indifference and neglect seems to drain Gregor’s energy, and he becomes more and more inert — though perhaps it is because of his injury, which is never dealt with; but whatever the reason, the result is that Gregor stops eating, though he never stops wanting to eat, particularly when he sees how well his family feeds their lodgers:

The gentlemen stood as one, and mumbled something into their beards. Then, once they were alone, they ate in near perfect silence. It seemed remarkable to Gregor that above all the various noises of eating their chewing teeth could still be heard, as if they had wanted to show Gregor that you need teeth in order to eat and it was not possible to perform anything with jaws that are toothless however nice they might be. “I’d like to eat something”, said Gregor anxiously, “but not anything like they’re eating. They do feed themselves. And here I am, dying!”

Gregor wants to eat because to eat means that he has been provided with food: in his case, because he cannot provide it for himself, it shows that he is cared for, that he is valued enough, to be fed. Of course: providing food for another is one of our most basic gifts, one of our most symbolic acts to show that we accept another, value another, enough to give them what they need to live. Sharing food is creating a connection, not only through the gift of a necessity (which means the giver must sacrifice some of their own necessary sustenance, an act of altruism that defines our survival strategy as a social animal rather than as a pure individual), but through the recognition that you and I eat the same thing. It is no accident that Gollum is incapable of eating the food that sustains Frodo and Sam; since Tolkien had a strong pro-Elf bias, it is a symbol of Gollum’s corruption and impurity that everything Elvish is anathema to him, including the lembas and Sam’s rope, which burns his skin. But this is our sign that Gollum is not good at his heart, that he is dangerous: he won’t eat the food. Indeed, it is food that Gollum uses to betray Sam and corrupt Frodo, who is already being corrupted by the Ring: as they climb the Black Stair towards Shelob’s cave, Gollum throws away the hobbits’ remaining food and then blames Sam, saying Sam ate it rather than share it with Frodo. This (false) betrayal of their partnership pushes Frodo to turn on Sam and send him away, because the way out of a man’s heart is also through his stomach.

Doubly true of hobbits.

Food is one of our defining characteristics, one of the clearest cultural markers; and thus, also, it is one way we separate ourselves from others: what we eat, versus what they eat. And in this case, it is more than simply a matter of different tastes: Gregor is given items that his family no longer recognizes as food. It is waste, it is refuse.

And we are what we eat.

So Gregor is not properly fed, and so he does not eat. He grows weaker and weaker, suffering more and more pain and exhaustion. Finally, Gregor himself becomes little more than garbage:

[H]e was covered in the dust that lay everywhere in his room and flew up at the slightest movement; he carried threads, hairs, and remains of food about on his back and sides; he was much too indifferent to everything now to lay on his back and wipe himself on the carpet like he had used to do several times a day.

And then at last, mercifully, he dies. He makes one last attempt to come out of his room and connect to his family, when Grete puts on a violin concert for the renters, and Gregor is enchanted by the music; but he is spotted, and the renters use the opportunity to reject the Samsa family entirely, declaring that they will be moving out and they will not be paying any rent, due to the shocking imposition of having had to live in the same apartment as that thing. Grete turns on her brother, now calling Gregor “it” and saying, “It’s got to go!” Gregor returns, one last time, to his room, and is locked in for the last time.

“What now, then?”, Gregor asked himself as he looked round in the darkness. He soon made the discovery that he could no longer move at all. This was no surprise to him, it seemed rather that being able to actually move around on those spindly little legs until then was unnatural. He also felt relatively comfortable. It is true that his entire body was aching, but the pain seemed to be slowly getting weaker and weaker and would finally disappear altogether. He could already hardly feel the decayed apple in his back or the inflamed area around it, which was entirely covered in white dust. He thought back of his family with emotion and love. If it was possible, he felt that he must go away even more strongly than his sister. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful rumination until he heard the clock tower strike three in the morning. He watched as it slowly began to get light everywhere outside the window too. Then, without his willing it, his head sank down completely, and his last breath flowed weakly from his nostrils.

In the end, Gregor is quite literally thrown away by the charwoman who had been filling his room with garbage. And when he is gone, the family is at last free, and happy. Happy ending! Hooray!

But of course it isn’t a happy ending. That would only be possible if the heroes of the story were the Samsa family, and the villain were Gregor, the monstrous insect who ruins their lives, but who they are eventually freed of, to live out the rest of their lives in bliss.  Of course that’s not it: the message of the story, the point Kafka is making, is not that the family would have been better off without Gregor; nor that terrible freak occurrences, such as the spontaneous transformation of a man into an insect, lead to terrible outcomes. 

The point is this:

No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury. He had suffered it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated as an enemy. On the contrary, as a family there was a duty to swallow any revulsion for him and to be patient, just to be patient.

Kafka says here, outright, how Gregor should be treated: insect or not (And I believe he is not, that he does not actually transform, but merely sees himself as his family sees him, as unworthy, as contemptible, as a monster: as inhuman. But I think that no matter how much he may feel like an ungeheuer Ungeziefer, he remains, both in his essence and in his actual physical form, human. Notice the original cover image, which does not show a bug.), incapable of earning money or not, he is a member of this family, and he should be treated with patience, and kindness. Instead, the family attacks him, harms him, refuses to feed or care for him, locks him away from them, and then ignores him in his pain and suffering, his sadness and loneliness, until he dies; and then they are relieved to be rid of him. I think it is especially telling that Kafka says “no one dared” to remove the apple from Gregor’s back; whether they are too disgusted by Gregor’s appearance, or too afraid to stand in opposition to his father’s will, they are ungenerous cowards. They are not the heroes of this fairy tale. They are the villains.

All people, all of us, have a share of this duty to all others who do not actively treat us as enemies: to treat others with kindness, to swallow any revulsion we may feel, no matter how monstrous they may be, and to be patient, just be patient. (And my God, what a small and simple request: only for patience. And my God, how we fail to give it.) Gregor shows us the right way, when, even as he is dying from his family’s neglect and violence, he thinks of them with empathy and love. While they let him be thrown away, first when he is alive, and then when he is dead. They do treat him as an enemy: and he loves them to his last breath. 

I think it is clear, then, who in this story is truly human — and who is garbage. 

But no: I can’t say that. Didn’t I just say that our duty as humans is to be patient with each other, to ignore the revulsion we may feel for those who act differently, look differently than we would want them to, and to treat them, even the most monstrous, with kindness and love — or at least with patience? Aren’t we all members of one extended family, really, considering how very much we have in common with each other, in comparison to how little we have in common with everything else in the universe? After all, we all breathe the same air, we all walk the same Earth — we all eat the same food. 

I do not want to be like Gollum: he is a murderer. I don’t even want to be like Bilbo, who wants the Ring more than he can admit to himself, though at least Bilbo doesn’t attack Frodo and bite his finger off in order to get the Ring. I admit that I don’t want to be like Gregor, either; I pity him, in his suffering, in his contempt for himself, in his attachment to a family who doesn’t deserve him. Most of all, though, I do not want to be like the Samsa family; and so I will be patient with them. I will resist the temptation to turn away in disgust. I will treat them as fellow humans. As my family.

Though I’m not sharing any of my food with them.