362
PARTISAN REVIEW
him once, but now she regards him with disgust and anger. In Mrs.
Samsa asthma and emotion struggle. She is a rather mechanical
mother, with some mechanical mother-love for her son, but we shall
soon see that she, too, is ready
to
give him up. The father, as already
remarked, has reached a certain summit of impressive strength and
brutality. From the very first he had been eager
to
hurt physically his
helpless son, and now the apple he has thrown has become embedded
in poor Gregor's beetle flesh.
PART THREE
Scene I:
"The serious injury done
to
Gregor, which disabled him
for more than a month-the apple went on sticking in his body as a
visible reminder, since no one ventured to remove it-seemed to have
made even his father recollect that Gregor was a member of the family,
despite his present unfortunate and repulsive shape, and ought not to
be treated as an enemy, that, on the contrary, family duty required the
suppression of disgust and the exercise of patience, nothing but
patience." The door theme is taken up again since now, in the evening,
the door leading from Gregor's darkened room to the lighted living
room is left open. This is a subtle situation. In the previous scene father
and mother had reached their highest point of energy, he in his
resplendent uniform pitching those little red bombs, emblems of
fruitfulness and manliness; and she, the mother, actually moving
furniture despite her frail breathing tubes. But after that peak there is a
fall , a weakening.
It
would almost seem that the father himself is on the
point of disintegrating and becoming a feeble beetle. Through the
opened door a curious current seems to pass. Gregor's beetle illness is
catching, his father seems to have caught it, the weakness, the drabness,
the dirt. "Soon after supper his father would fall asleep in his
armchair; his mother and sister would admonish each other to be
silent; his mother, bending low over the lamp, stitched at fine sewing
for an underwear firm; his sister, who had taken a job as a salesgirl, was
learning shorthand and French in the evenings on the chance of
bettering herself. Sometimes his father woke up, and as if quite
unaware that he had been sleeping said to the mother: 'What a lot of
sewing you're doing today!' and at once fell asleep again, while the two
women exchanged a tired smile.
"With a kind of mulishness his father persisted in keeping his
uniform on even in the house; his dressing gown hung uselessly on its
peg and he slept fully dressed where he sat, as if he were ready for
