A Bug's Life

Reality is perception; perception is shaped by an individual’s bias and ironically, what they believe is possible in reality. I must digress to impart an event that has been greatly overlooked: When the Spanish settlers first departed to the Americas, they utilized ships. One day the medicine-man of a tribe saw ripples upon the ocean and knew not what created them so, every day he would stare at the same area of water until one day he saw the ships and immediately alerted his tribesmen to the enigmas who then in turn saw them; they had great respect for the medicine man and trusted him so they believed. This aside illustrates my aforementioned point, but since we do not know what the boundaries are in The Metamorphoses by Kafka we can not say what is reality in the stories universe.
Gregor Samsa spends one third of his life working, the other sleeping and the remainder in contemplation and stress as many unfortunate Americans do. In this respect the story presents itself very grounded in what we view to be reality, a Prufrock like one at that. Everything in the past stems from reality whilst from the onset we are blatantly told that this story transcends our expectations. Nearly everything afterwards breaks from at least my concept of reality, as the household simply lives with a gigantic bug. That may or may not enjoy the taste of brains. Gregor lives, well survives, for many months without even someone daring to take a picture of what he has become. If I were to wake up to such a creature I would make sure that someone of authority knew it at least existed.
Some say that their resistance to alert… anyone lies in the families disgrace of having such an abomination and this transcends reality in a way; that a family would care so much for their sense of respect that they allow their son-turned-bug to fester in the darkness without even trying to restore him to his former being. Respect is such an abstract term that arguably one could command much of it without it really even having an effect and thus any way to know it is there, yet people hold it to so high of a standard that they would die for it, and let die. The abstract terms that people invent to give importance to themselves, thus being able to appear greater than others, such as ‘value’ are a core theme in this story. Yet by almost all measures being abstract they are determined by an individual’s reality, so they themselves are not real, or at least not static.
Gregor himself was abstract, intangible to his family. Had he the characteristics of a bug that went to work none would have been the wiser. Yet when he was impeded by going to work by his physical handicap all took notice. I believe that he actually turned into a bug as it would explain the lack of care he received by both family and an outside party, the repulsion of the chief, the apple sinking into his flesh and most importantly the tracks he left on the ceiling, which was corroborated by his sister’s annoyance as to cleaning it. By Gregor finally assuming what he has felt like all along he forces the family to change from the lazy bugs they were into bitter, slowly-building-up-hate lower-class people. His change was the catalysis for their metamorphosis, his death the birth of a new life for them.
Kudos to family bonding.