Vol. 47 No. 3 1980 - page 351

VLADIMIR NABOKOV
351
Scene III:
The getting out of bed ordeal in which man plans but
beetle acts. Gregor still thinks of his body in human terms, but now a
human's lower part is a beetle's hind part, a human 's upper part is a
beetle's fore part. A man on all fours seems to him to correspond to a
beetle on all sixes. He does not quite yet understand this and will
persistently try to stand up on his third pair of legs. "He thought that
he might get out of bed with the lower part of his body first, but this
lower part, which he had not yet seen and of which he could form no
clear conception, proved too difficult to move; it was all so slow; and
when at last almost savagely he gathered his forces together and thrust
out recklessly, he had miscalculated the direction and bumped heavily
against the lower end of the bed, and the burning pain he felt taught
him that it was the lower part of his body that probably for the time
being was the most sensitive.... But then he said to himself: 'Before it
strikes a quarter past seven I must
be
quite out of this bed, without fail.
Anyhow, by that time someone will have come from the office to ask
what is the matter with me, since it opens before seven.' And he set
himself to rocking his whole body -at once in a regular series of jolts,
with the idea of swinging it out of the bed.
If
he tipped himself out in
that way he could keep his head from injury by lifting it at an acute
angle when he fell. His back seemed to be hard and was not likely to
suffer from a fall on the carpet. His biggest worry was the loud crash he
would not
be
able to help making, which would probably cause
anxiety, if not terror, behind all the doors. Still, he must take the
risk.... Well, ignoring the fact that the doors were all locked, ought
he really to call for help? In spite of his misery he could not suppress a
smile at the very idea of it."
Scene IV:
He is still struggling when the family theme, or the
theme of the many doors, takes over again, and in the course of this
scene he falls out of bed at last, with a dull thud. The conversation is a
little on the lines of a Greek chorus. From Gregor's office the head clerk
has been sent to see why he has not yet turned up at the station. This
grim speed in checking a remiss employee has all the qualities of a bad
dream. The speaking through doors, as in the second scene, is now
repeated. Note the sequence: the chief clerk talks to Gregor from the
living room on the left; Gregor's sister, Grete, talks to her brother from
the room on the right; the mother and father join the chief clerk in the
living room. Gregor can still speak, but his voice becomes more and
more indistinct, and soon his speech cannot be understood. (In
Finnegans Wake,
written twenty years later by James Joyce, two
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