Food Symbolism and Dehumanization in Kafka's Metamorphosis

Introduction: Food and the Bourgeois Household

Food in Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis serves both a narrative function and a symbolic one. After all, Gregor Samsa's family is seated at an ordinary bourgeois breakfast at the very moment Gregor awakens from his uneasy dreams. This may seem like ordinary scene-setting, but it also establishes the centrality of food to bourgeois family life. We should not be surprised, then, that the succeeding portions of the novella use food to consign Gregor to sub-human positions, as the family gradually ceases to regard him as a member of its cohesive structure. Through close analysis of the episodes in The Metamorphosis that deal with food, this essay argues that Kafka's use of food is coherent and purposeful, and that food imagery maps each stage of Gregor's dehumanization.

The story begins at breakfast, and this setting is highly effective precisely because we can all imagine the experience of a giant insect turning up at the breakfast table. Many translations, including Wylie's, describe Gregor in the opening sentence as a "vermin," and by definition vermin are not welcome in human domestic situations. A regular cockroach at the breakfast table is disgusting; a human-sized cockroach is inexplicable. As Simon Ryan additionally notes, there are "anti-Semitic connotations...that the word carried for Kafka," since in "anti-Semitic political publications, Jews were frequently referred to as...'vermin'" (Ryan 209). The family's response is to hide Gregor in his room, as though there were something shameful — or even potentially contagious — about him.

Gregor as Vermin at the Family Table

Despite the family's collective horror, Gregor's sister is unwilling to forget entirely who he is. He is drawn to his door by the smell of food:

"It was only when he had reached the door that he realised what it actually was that had drawn him over to it; it was the smell of something to eat. By the door there was a dish filled with sweetened milk with little pieces of white bread floating in it." (Kafka, II)

The Sister's Offering and the Loss of Human Taste

Two problems, however, undercut the human relationship this gesture implies. The first is that the sister has essentially left food for Gregor as one would for a pet — his favorite food placed on the floor. The second is that Gregor is no longer fully human, so even his tastes have changed: though "milk like this was normally his favorite drink," nevertheless "the milk did not taste at all nice" (Kafka, II). Food here marks a decisive step in Gregor's dehumanization: he can no longer consume what once sustained him as a person, and instead begins eating things he had previously refused, such as the cheese he had once called inedible.

The final step in Gregor's dehumanization is also marked by food: the apple his father hurls at him, which ultimately causes his death. This is wielded as a weapon when Gregor's "father had decided to bombard him" (Kafka, II):

Conclusion: Food as a Map of Dehumanization

Corngold, Stanley. "Allotria and Excreta in the Penal Colony." In Bloom, Harold, Franz Kafka. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Print.

Kafka, Franz. "The Metamorphosis." Translated by David Wylie. Project Gutenberg, 2002. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5200/5200-h/5200-h.htm

Ryan, Simon. "Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung." In Bloom, Harold, Franz Kafka. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2010. Print.