Samsa in Love and Metamorphosis

I was completely unprepared for reading Metamorphosis and I did not even realize that Gregor had become an actual bug (I thought it was just a metaphor) for the first few pages until I looked it up. I could actually believe this kind of story would be written by Murakami because of the seemingly randomness of the selection of the bug and the fact that it has somewhat of a connection to A Wild Sheep Chase and how the sheep enters different people's bodies (just based on the fact that an animal/bug is involved in transformation), so it also makes sense that Murakami would write a spin-off as well in Samsa in Love. 

The idea of consciousness also struck me in both of the stories and it kind of amazed me that both Gregor's were fully conscious during both their transitions to the bug and transition to human-ness. It is scary to think that one could still be conscious but people are not able to understand that they are. This isn't just in fiction though; it happens in real life when people go into coma's and then when they come out of it they say that they have actually been conscious and aware the whole time. I wonder if, when they come out of their coma, they have the same experiences as Gregor in Samsa in Love when he awakens from somewhere and has to re-learn how to be human. 

Probably, if Gregor Samsa's family in Kafka's story had really tried, they could have realized that he was able to communicate. But they completely isolated him and took pity on themselves for being in such a horrible situation, the first in their family for it to happen to. I'm not surprised that they were not smart enough to figure it out, because they seemed to always have things handed to them, as Gregor Samsa did when he was still working. Because no one explained to them that Gregor Samsa might still be a real person, they didn't realize it and went into a panic. This eventually lead to their son's death. I think this is a potential metaphor about how misunderstanding, panic, and ignorance can lead to unnecessary loss of life. 

-Audrey