358
PARTISAN REVIEW
his appearance, she came a little earlier than usual and found him
gazing out of the window, quite motionless, and thus well placed to
look like a bogey . . .. She jumped back as if in alarm and banged the
door shut; a stranger might well have thought that he had been lying in
wait for her there meaning
to
bite her. Of course he hid himself under
the couch at once, but he had to wait until midday before she came
again , and she seemed more ill at ease than usual." These things hurt,
and nobody understood how they hurt. In an exquisite display of
feeling, in order to spare her the repulsive sight of him, Gregor one day
" carried a sheet on his back to the couch-it cost him four hours '
labor-and arranged it there in such a way as to hide him completely,
so that even if she were
to
bend down she could not see him.... Gregor
even fancied that he caught a thankful glance from her eye when he
lifted the sheet carefully a very little with his head to see how she was
taking the new arrangement."
It
should be noted how kind, how good our poor little monster is.
His beetlehood, while distorting and degrading his body, seems to
bring out in him all his human sweetness. His utter unselfishness, his
constant preoccupation with the needs of others-this, against the
backdrop of his hideous plight comes out in strong relief. Kafka 's art
consists in accumulating on the one hand , Gregor's insect features, all
the sad detail of his insect disguise, and on the other hand, in keeping
vivid and limpid before the reader's eyes Gregor's sweet and subtle
human nature.
Scene VII:
Here occurs the furniture-moving scene. Two months
have passed. Up
to
now only his sister has been visiting him; but,
Gregor says to himself, my sister is only a child; she has taken on
herself the job of caring for me merely out of childish thoughtlessness.
My mother should understand the situation better. So here in the
seventh scene the mother, asthmatic, feeble, and muddleheaded, will
enter his room for the first time. Kafka prepares the scene carefully. For
recreation Gregor had formed the habit of walking on the walls and
ceiling. He is at the height of the meagre bliss his beetlehood can
produce. "His sister at once remarked the new distraction Gregor had
found for himself-he left traces behind him of the sticky stuff on his
sales wherever he crawled-and she got the idea in her head of giving
him as wide a field as possible to crawl in and of removing the pieces of
furniture that hindered him, above all the chest of drawers and the
writing desk." Thus the mother is brought in to help move the
furniture. She comes to his door with exclamations of joyful eagerness
to see her son, an incongruous and automatic reaction that is replaced
