The novel The Metamorphosis is a novel of a travel agent, Gregor Samsa, that works in order to keep his family happy and free from worry of his boss. With a twist, he becomes a human-sized beetle-like insect that prevents him from continuing work. In the beginning, when he first wakes up to notice his transformation, his family knows that something is wrong with him. Not only is he not out of bed on time, but his door is locked and he refuses to come out or let them into his room. Instead, he insists that he is alright and will be out shortly, pardoning them from worrying. Finally, he opens the door to come out and his family is horrified. Rather than understanding him, they act in terror and push him in his room where he is locked away.
To continue, I found this novel to have a great relation to The Leavers, a novel where he did not turn into something else, yet someone else. Daniel was transformed from Deming Guo to Daniel Wilkinson. Where for Gregor, he was transformed into an insect, for which his family could not accept. During the course of both novels the two main characters struggles with alienation: Deming with his adoptive family, Gregor with his family and his boss. They both struggle with the feeling of being a burden and never get to do what they truly want to with the feeling of being accepted. In fact, this is a prime example of “othering”, where these two characters are being treated as a different group which is less of the other.
In the end, there are a number of injustices that one can see occurring with the short summary above. To narrow it down, I chose the major one that I found to be occurring was alienation, which in turn is the same as the term we used in class, “othering”.
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