The Door
Fair warning: this is a full summary of The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, and it spoils the ending. A travelling salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant vermin, and the book spends almost no time on why.
What it does spend time on is the door of his room. I counted the words door, doors and doorway, and they appear one hundred five times in about twenty-two thousand words.
So here is my short answer. The story has three parts, and each part has its own door. In part one it is locked from the inside. In part two it is locked from the outside. In part three it is left open, and then locked for good. In my reading, that is the real plot. We go part by part, with the clock, the key, the money and the counts.
The Edition And The Counts
I am using Project Gutenberg ebook number five thousand two hundred, titled Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, in the translation by David Wyllie. The file gives the release as August two thousand five. It also says this translation is under copyright and posted with the holder’s permission, so I paraphrase and keep every quote tiny.
The text has three parts, and they are almost exactly equal. Part one is seven thousand one hundred nineteen words. Part two is seven thousand five hundred eight. Part three is seven thousand four hundred nineteen. That makes twenty-two thousand forty-six. My rule: runs of letters, hyphenated words split, no title lines and no legal text.
Door words run forty in part one, thirty-four in part two and thirty-one in part three. They fall a little each time.
Part One: Locked From Inside
Part one is a single morning. Gregor wakes with an armour-like back, a brown belly in stiff sections and many thin legs. His alarm was set for four. His train left at five. It is already half past six, and he worries about his boss, not his body.
At quarter to seven his mother knocks at the door by his head. His father knocks at one side door, and his sister whispers at the other. Gregor answers in a voice that has changed, and he does not open, because he locks every door at night, even at home.
Around ten past seven the bell rings. It is the chief clerk, sent from the firm to ask why Gregor missed the train. Through the wood he scolds Gregor about his sales and mentions money that was recently entrusted to him.
Then Gregor turns the key with his jaw, and a brown fluid runs from his mouth. The door opens. The clerk gasps and flees down the stairs. His mother sinks to the floor. His father clenches his fists, then weeps.
Gregor chases the clerk to save his job. His father seizes the clerk’s stick and a newspaper, hisses, and drives him back. Gregor sticks in the doorway, scraped and bleeding, until a shove sends him through, and the door is slammed with the stick. Door one: locked by Gregor, opened by Gregor, shut by his father.
Part Two: Locked From Outside
Part two begins at dusk. Gregor smells food: a dish of sweetened milk with bread, left by the door. He turns away from it. During the evening each side door is opened a crack and shut again, but nobody comes in. That morning everyone wanted in. Now nobody does.
The first real entry is the next morning, by his sister Grete, who is seventeen. She tests his taste with old food spread on a newspaper, and when she leaves she turns the key from outside, so he knows he can eat. That is the routine, twice a day. The maid begs to be let go on day one and is gone within a quarter of an hour.
Gregor hides under the couch, and spends four hours carrying a bedsheet over it so Grete need not see him. His parents stay out for fourteen days.
Then comes the furniture. Grete wants the room emptied so he can crawl. Their mother objects, but Grete takes everything except the couch. Gregor clings to the framed picture of the lady in furs. His mother sees him and faints. Grete shouts his name, the first word she has spoken to him directly since the change.
His father comes home in a bank uniform and throws apples. One lodges in Gregor’s back. The last thing he sees is his mother, begging for his life. Door two: locked from outside, with a key used as a signal. Grete enters daily, their mother once, their father not at all.
The Family Ledger
The door is also a cash register. In part one Gregor is the only earner. He has worked for the firm five years, and he is paying off his parents’ debt to the boss, which he reckons will take another five or six years.
In part two he can earn nothing, and that is when his father explains the money, from a cash box saved when his business collapsed five years earlier. There is some capital and some of Gregor’s untouched pay, enough for one or two years. Father is old, mother has asthma, Grete is seventeen. Gregor had planned to send her to the conservatory, and announce it at Christmas.
In part three the earners go from one to three. Father wears the bank uniform and carries breakfasts. Mother sews underwear for a fashion shop. Grete sells in a shop and studies shorthand and French at night. The maid is dismissed, jewellery is sold, and a room is rented to three bearded lodgers.
Notice something. The text never gives one sum of money. Every figure is years or people.
Part Three: The Door Left Open
Now the living-room door is left open every evening, and Gregor lies in the dark and watches. Father dozes in his uniform. Mother sews. Grete studies. The lodgers’ spare furniture and the kitchen rubbish pile up in his room, and he almost stops eating.
The flat is far too big for them now, yet they cannot move. The text says despair holds them back more than the trouble of carrying Gregor. Sometimes he thinks of taking over the family’s affairs again. Other times he is simply angry, and plans to raid the pantry.
The charwoman, who replaced the maid, opens his door morning and evening to look in. She calls him an old dung-beetle. When he moves toward her, she lifts a chair, and waits.
Once his mother scrubs his room with buckets of water. Grete returns, sobs, and the whole family erupts in shouting. Gregor hisses that nobody thought to close the door and spare him the noise.
Then one evening the door stays open while the lodgers dine. Grete plays the violin for them. The lodgers drift away from the music, and Gregor creeps out, covered in dust, toward her. The middle lodger points. Father rushes to block the view. The lodgers give notice and talk about damages.
The Ending: At Last
Grete speaks. We must get rid of it, she says. She will not call this monster her brother, and believing it is Gregor has only harmed them. Father agrees.
Gregor means no harm. He simply turns around to go back, knocking his head on the floor as he does. Nobody stops him. He is barely inside before the door is shut, bolted and locked, and Grete says to her parents, At last.
Gregor thinks of his family with love, and feels he must go away even more strongly than his sister does. The clock tower strikes three. At dawn his head sinks, and his last breath leaves him.
The charwoman finds him and pokes him with her broom. The family comes into his room, and I find no earlier scene where his father steps inside it. They give thanks to God. Father orders the lodgers out.
The charwoman announces that the thing in there has been sorted out, and Mr Samsa stops her describing it. The family writes three letters excusing themselves from work and takes a tram to the country, in sunshine, at the end of March. They talk about a smaller flat, and about finding Grete a husband. The last image is Grete, first to stand, stretching her young body.
What The Text Calls Him
So, is Gregor a cockroach? In this translation the word cockroach appears zero times. So does the word insect. The word vermin appears once, in the first sentence. Beetle appears twice, both in part three, both from the charwoman, as dung-beetle.
What the text actually gives you is the armour-like back, a brown belly in sections, many legs, antennae named once, and a strong jaw but no proper teeth. I make no diagnosis, and the book makes none.
The family’s words shift. The chief clerk hears the voice of an animal. Grete uses animal and monster. Yet the narration says Gregor two hundred ninety-eight times: eighty-five in part one, one hundred ten in part two and one hundred three in part three. It keeps the name even when his sister says he is not Gregor.
What It Adds Up To
In my reading, which is an opinion, the book is less about the transformation than about what a household does with a closed door. In part one Gregor keeps it shut against the world. In part two the family keeps it shut for him. In part three they open it to watch him, then shut it when he is in the way.
Here is the cheat sheet. Part one: locked from inside, opened by Gregor, slammed by his father. Part two: locked from outside, Grete’s key, apples. Part three: open evenings, a violin, then bolted. At last.
The book is short. At a steady two hundred fifty words a minute, my rule of thumb, it is about ninety minutes. In my view, read it if you want a short classic you can finish in one evening, and skip it if you cannot stand a story that stays bleak to the last page.
Every reading here is mine, so check it against the book. If this helped, subscribe, and tap like. And tell me in the comments: which door scene stayed with you?
