Business and Social Sciences
Business and social sciences | Online ISSN 3067-8919
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Volume 4 Number 1 2026
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Beyond the Insect Body: Alienation, Existential Crisis, and the Human Condition in Kafka's The Metamorphosis
Md. Sazzad Hossain1, Mohammad Shah Alam Chowdhury1*
Business and Social Sciences 4 (1) 1-8 https://doi.org/10.25163/social.4110876
Submitted: 31 May 2026 Revised: 06 August 2026 Accepted: 07 August 2026 Published: 09 August 2026
Abstract
Background: Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis has long been read through separate critical lenses — symbolic, psychological, social, existential — yet few studies have asked what happens when these readings are held together rather than apart. This gap matters because Gregor Samsa's transformation resists tidy categorization; it is, at once, a domestic tragedy, a philosophical parable, and a quiet indictment of a world that prices people by their output. Methods: Using a qualitative, interpretive approach grounded in close textual analysis, this study examines Kafka's novella alongside both classical and recent literary criticism. Passages concerning Gregor's transformation, his family relationships, and his psychological interiority were purposively selected and read against established alienation and existentialist frameworks to trace how these threads interact across the text. Results: The analysis suggests Gregor's alienation predates his physical change — it is unmasked, not created, by it — and that his silence about why he has transformed functions less as an unresolved plot hole than as a deliberate absurdist gesture. Family rejection emerges as the mechanism through which economic usefulness quietly replaces love as the family's organizing value. Conclusion: Read together, these threads support a single, integrated claim: Gregor's transformation dramatizes the erosion of human worth in a world that measures people by productivity, offering a philosophical vision that remains, uncomfortably, current.
Keywords: Franz Kafka; The Metamorphosis; alienation; existential crisis; human condition
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