-
Does Gregor Samsa Crawl over the Ceiling and Walls?: Intra-narrative Fiction in Kafka's Die Verwandlung
- Monatshefte
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Volume 105, Number 2, Summer 2013
- pp. 278-314
- 10.1353/mon.2013.0031
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
The overwhelming majority of scholars assume that in Die Verwandlung Gregor crawls over the walls and the ceiling. The intra-narrative reality of the sticky substance ("Klebstoff") which, according to the narrator, Gregor has in his extremities, is also taken for granted. A close reading of the text allows us to infer, however, that the purported crawling and the sticky substance are a mere product of the imagination of Gregor's deeply perturbed mind, and that Kafka himself never took the references to the "Klebstoff" and the "Herumkriechen" seriously: they are nothing but intra-narrative fiction. This conclusion provides another cogent argument a contrario that Gregor Samsa is always—for the author and for the other characters in the novella—purely and simply a human being.