Abstract
Upon his transformation, at the outset of The Metamorphosis, into a “monstrous vermin,” Gregor Samsa asks himself a rather predictable question: “What’s happened to me?” In response, the narrator tells us only that “it was no dream.” Both Samsa’s question and the narrator’s response haunt the entire text-the question is never satisfactorily answered and the response itself is continually challenged as Kafka narrates a surreal sequence of events. It is noteworthy as well that Samsa asks himself the question and the narrator supplies a rejoinder. Embedded in this question are several: “Am I the same?” “How, exactly, have I been affected by this metamorphosis?” “Have I really changed or am I just dreaming?” “What has happened? “What kind of happening is this?” “How has this happened? The question, in itself, does not privilege either the subject of the happening, the “what” of the happening, the “how” of the happening, or the happening itself. Instead, all are placed in question, and the question is left suspended and remains suspended even after the story has ended.1
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Notes
The explicit self-reflexivity of this question makes it especially apparent why, as Heidegger has noted in “What is Metaphysics?”, “the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, is placed in question.” See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 95–96. The apparent simplicity of this initial question, “What’s happened to me?”, conceals the very real danger, in Gregor Samsa’s case, that the answer will turn out to be “nothing.”
The clearest articulation of the “natural standpoint” appears in Husserl’s chapter entitled “The Thesis of the Natural Standpoint and its Suspension,” in Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce-Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 96: “I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all other men found in it and related in the same way to it. This ‘fact-world,’ as the world already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. ‘The’ world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points ‘other’ than I supposed, this or that under such names as ‘illusion,’ ‘hallucination,’ and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the ‘it’ remains ever, in the sense of the general thesis, a world that has its being out there.”
Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), 43. Subsequent references to The Metamorphosis will be incorporated into the text).
Maurice Natanson, Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 9.
Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 327.
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Weiss, G. (1995). Anonymity, Alienation, and Suspension in Kafka’s Metamorphosis . In: Crowell, S.G. (eds) The Prism of the Self. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8408-1_14
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