“His daily existence, on the surface of his daily worries, suddenly stops. Gregor pierced the surface. He awakens with an inexpressible feeling of alienation from the world around him, to which he had adapted to the point of self-oblivion” (Tauber 19-20). Gregor is alienated in other ways too. Samsa is alienated from the rest of his family because they are a capitalist society in and of themselves that has commodified Samsa into a commodity. “The individual is alienated from himself to the extent that he is alienated from his essential nature as a human being” (Sokel 2). Gregor's work is imposed on him by his family solely out of economic necessity, he is not just a worker alienated from his work; he is separated from his own humanity. In this sense, a form of self-alienation is implemented in Gregor Samsa. “Human self-alienation is not limited to factory work, but includes any type of work in which an individual is engaged simply for the wages or income it brings him” (Sokel 2). Samsa is so rooted in the idea of work that, even in a different body, these impulses are always present. Gregor finds his job unbearable and has thought about telling his boss his opinion on the situation. Kafka, says Howard Fast, “is only concerned with demonstrating that a certain type of human being is so similar to a cockroach that it is entirely plausible for him to wake up one morning and discover
tags