Kafka’s Metamorphosis: An Animal (Insect) Alter (Alternate Personality) in a Multiple Personality Story

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (1), a big insect, and “It was no dream” (1). This is how Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins.

The story has had numerous and divergent interpretations. However, it is indisputable and well known that Kafka’s Wedding Preparations in the Country contains an earlier, more psychologically-revealing version.

“The Metamorphosis (1915)…borrows heavily from Wedding Preparations. When Raban [a character in the latter] sent his ‘clothed body’ traveling in 1907, he famously wanted to remain in bed and metamorphose into a beetle…We learn in the opening paragraphs of The Metamorphosis that Samsa has worked as a traveling salesman for exactly five years: from precisely the time Kafka wrote most of Wedding Preparations, in 1907, to the year he began The Metamorphosis (1912)” (John Zilcosky) (1, p. 249).

“The image of the beetle first appears in Wedding Preparations in the Country…The hero of the novel, a young man named Raban…enjoys imagining that in order to avoid exertions and discomfort, he splits himself. His authentic self stays home in the form of a gigantic beetle resting in bed. His ‘clothed body,’ literally his façade, staggers out into the world to do the job” (Walter H. Sokol) (2, pp. 165-6).

from Wedding Preparations in the Country:

“And besides, can’t I do it the way I always did as a child when dangerous matters were involved? I don’t even have to go to the country myself, it isn’t necessary. I’ll send [only] my clothed body…For I, I am meanwhile lying in my bed, all covered up with a yellow-brown blanket…As I lie in bed I assume the shape of a big beetle, a stag beetle or a June beetle, I think…The form of a big beetle, yes” (1, p. 67).

Note: “…the way I always did as a child when dangerous matters were involved.” Multiple personality starts in childhood as a dissociative (dividing the self) defense against traumatic experiences. He is saying that, when, as a child, he faced inescapable traumatic experiences, he would psychologically split, leaving an empty shell personality to deal with the trauma, while he imagined himself as a snug, safe, hidden bug. And that, as an adult, he would continue to switch into his bug personality when he had to face bad situations, leaving a sort of empty-suit personality to deal with the situation.

So I guess one day Kafka decided to use the insect personality as the main character of a story. Of course, the literary convention for a split personality or “double” story is to incarnate the alternate personality as a character in its own right, which, in this case, meant an actual insect (an unusually large one with human thoughts).

In real life, have there actually been people who had multiple personality disorder, whose alternate personalities included animal alters? Yes (3). (The cases cited involved people with multiple personality disorder, ones who had histories of extreme trauma, not all the memories of which could be corroborated, as opposed to normal multiple personality, which is discussed in this blog. But the point here is only that people can have animal alters, and there is no doubt about that.)

In conclusion, I have analyzed Kafka’s Metamorphosis from the perspective of Multiple Identity Literary Theory, and found that it is a multiple personality, theme-of-the-double type of story. As has often been the case in this blog, I have used facts that were already known and accepted, but whose significance in terms of multiple personality had not been fully appreciated.

1. Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis. Translated and edited by Stanley Corngold. New York, Modern Library, 1972/2013

2. Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis. Translated and edited by Stanley Corngold. New York, Bantam Classic, 1972/2004.

3. Hendrickson KM, McCarty T, Goodwin JM. “Animal Alters: Case Reports.” Dissociation, Vol III, No. 4 (Dec 1990), pp. 218-221.