Quiz on Kafka-Week 4

1.  After reading all of Book 1, it seems to me that Kafka uniquely portrays the Call to Adventure before introducing the Ordinary World.  Gregor's Call to Adventure is that he woke up "from anxious dreams" and discovered that "he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."  This depiction causes me, as the reader, to wonder what Gregor is going to do about the task set before him, and I hope that the succeeding plot action will be based around conquering or resolving this Call to Adventure.  The Ordinary World is then portrayed in the following paragraphs, where we are shown through Gregor's thoughts that he is a traveling salesman stuck in a crippling career due to a feud between his parents and his manager.

2.  The most obvious critique of social issues in this story so far appears to be the overall mistreatment of the working class.  Although we may not be able to completely trust Gregor's thoughts at this point, he spends a lot of time thinking about how unfairly treated he is in his job and the way in which the manager takes advantage of him.  On the other hand, his family must be relatively well-off because they have a servant, so maybe it is just Gregor's own, flawed perception of his life.  In relation to "The Red Scare," Kafka's portrayal of Gregor as "a monstrous verminous bug" could be used as a metaphor for McCarthy's manipulation of the American people in the 1950's.  Gregor's response to his metamorphosis almost implies that it was not an unexpected transformation; Like it was something he chose or at least, in some way, saw coming.  He seems more concerned with the fact that he woke up three hours late than with the fact that he woke up a different species.  Therefore, his disposition on the matter reminds me much of McCarthy.  McCarthy created an idea in his head that he wanted to use to manipulate the world around him and get what he wanted; He used the scare tactic of Communism.  Perhaps Gregor is not much unlike this.  He seems to feel quite out of control of his life, so perhaps in order to gain a certain amount of power over the people in his life, he chose to become a creature that would scare the people around him into believing in him rather than taking him for granted--as he may have felt in the past.  This is essentially what The Red Scare was about.

3.  Gregor turns into "a monstrous verminous bug" that sounds something like a spider.