“His father was moving forward implacably, emitting hissing sounds like a savage.”

To come to any type of understanding about a story it is of the utmost importance to understand the author and “The Metamorphosis,” is no exception. Franz Kafka was likely inserting himself and his father into the story when he wrote “The Metamorphosis”. Franz was a small, timid, frightened child growing up in Germany to a father he considered narcissistic and abusive. He felt ashamed to be his father’s child, Franz looked at his father with broad shoulders and big muscles and knew that he could never live up to his father’s size nor athletic abilities which shattered his confidence. Kafka often worked jobs beneath his abilities, he aspired to be a writer but the idea was shot down the moment he brought it up to his father. Franz was meek and rarely stood up for himself, he was unable to form any real connection with women around him and constantly turned to brothels to compensate.

Within this context, Franz wasn’t much different than Gregor, both felt as if they were a burden to the world. Franz like Gregor was unable to form any real connections to those around him. His mother was a nice woman but was often too scared and naive to ever stand up to his brute of a father, not much different than the mother we encounter within the story. Kafka may have been living out his fantasy within Metamorphosis, he may have been foreshadowing the feeling that his family would’ve been much better off without him as he felt his life served very little purpose.

Franz had even written a 47-page latter to his narcissistic and abusive father to let him know why he was so scared of him and how his father could’ve treated him differently. Kafka at even one time suggests how his father could’ve simply trampled on him like a roach, “We were so different and in our difference so dangerous to each other that if anyone had tried to calculate in advance how I, the slowly developing child, and you, the full-grown man, would stand to each other, he could have assumed that you would simply trample me underfoot so that nothing was left of me.”

Unfortunately when Franz gave the letter to his mother to be delivered to his father she gave it back to him and said his father couldn’t be bothered with something like that. Franz was never able to tell his father how he really felt and was never able to achieve his own metamorphosis. Through this story, Franz may have been living out the transformation he felt he never was able to achieve.