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Catherine Delage
Professor Reiko Tachibana
CMLIT 004U
16 December 2014
The Metamorphosis, “The Elephant Vanishes,” and the Human Condition
Franz Kafka was a German speaking Jewish novelist born in Prague in 1883;
Haruki Murakami is a Japanese novelist born in Japan in 1949. Despite these obvious
differences in nationality and time period, these two authors maintain a similar style and
ability to build themes in a strange and often subtly unsettling reality. Their writings also
elucidate or reflect the state of their societies. This is especially evident when looking at
Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis and Murakami’s short story “The Elephant
Vanishes.” By incorporating animal symbolism and instances of transformation, and
using similar characterization, these stories develop themes about transformation and its
effect on identity, the degradation of human nature, the concept of man as a machine, and
the implications of imbalance in society or nature.
To take a look at society, there should first be a human through whom you can
view the author’s created world. In The Metamorphosis, we have Gregor Samsa, a
traveling salesman who mysteriously transforms into a giant cockroach, while in “The
Elephant Vanishes” the narrator leads us through the story. These two characters both
live precise lives, in that they are very conscious of time, and routine, and habit, and
spend a majority of their lives preoccupied by these. For instance, after Gregor has woken
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to find himself plus one shiny, black exoskeleton, he tries to go back to sleep only to find
that he cannot, because he can only sleep on his right side. This is so important to him, in
fact, that he tries to roll over “hundreds of times” (Kafka 4). Gregor’s awareness of time
can be attributed to his work as a traveling salesman, since he must catch trains and make
meetings and fill out reports, all according to some exact schedule. For Gregor, one of the
first indications that something is horribly wrong is the fact that it is quarter to seven,
when his alarm should have gone off at four (Kafka 6). From the moment he is
introduced, his transformation is secondary to his work, which seems to fill the core of
his character, at least at the beginning. Once we learn that Gregor is only working at this
horrid job because he’s trying to pay off his parents’ debt, and that he would love to quit
as soon as possible, this “core” becomes soulless. His days, his life, revolve around work,
and yet his work is essentially meaningless. To look at Murakami’s narrator is to see a
similar situation unfold. For the narrator, living is work. He is always up at six-thirteen,
and he reads the newspaper all the way through, cover to cover. And yet, he doesn’t read
– he “plows through,” making a morning habit seem like it is part of his job – and not a
part he necessarily enjoys (Murakami 310). Then, as he details his interest in the town’s
elephant, it is learned that he keeps an extensive scrapbook on the subject, and that he
attended the town council’s meetings when they discussed the elephant problem
(Murakami 312). The way he delineates the dilemma of the town in regards to the
elephant, and the way he closely analyzes the initial article on the disappearance show
how job-oriented the narrator is. While his life may not revolve around his actual job, he
treats his life and leisure as if it were his job. By the end of the story, the narrator has also
seemingly become soulless – he cannot seem to make anything matter to him anymore,
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and simply lives according to vague memories of how society wants him to live. These
characterizations lend themselves to the theme of the man as machine. Robotically living
out their lives according to some societal pressure or expectation, they have lost some
essential bit of humanity that gives life meaning, which makes life matter. These
characters show that the rigidity of society can be dangerous (Hower 2). However, we
learn this through very different character arcs. Gregor’s transformation frees him from
the burden of work, and so he actually gains insight into the state of humanity and his
own life over the course of the story. The narrator, on the other hand, has a meaning, a
purpose in his life, loosely represented by the elephant, and loses it by the story’s end. As
he puts it, “some kind of balance inside me has shifted since the elephant affair,” and now
he no longer functions completely (Murakami 327).
The animal symbolism in both stories helps to encompass the themes being
conveyed. By using animals, the authors create metaphors to aid in the interpretation of
their message, because animals create connotations, or mental building blocks that
readers can use to create connections to society. In The Metamorphosis, the focal animal
is the cockroach. Cockroaches are an animal most would kill on sight; their lives are
inconsequential. They are a sign of filth or decay, and are just generally disliked or
despised. This connection to decay is especially important, since it reflects how Gregor’s
life has decayed as a result of deferring his dreams. However, cockroaches do have a
function in life – they get rid of rotten things. In the context of The Metamorphosis this
translates to the fact that Gregor may have been working an awful job he didn’t want to
do, and his new body may be a huge burden to his family, and yet, working his job was
paying off debts, and Gregor’s inability to work made his family stronger and closer
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(albeit without Gregor). Although the use of a cockroach solidifies the degradation of
humanity, it also aids in showing identity. For Gregor, his true identity, or his true self,
isn’t clear until after he has lived as an insect. In the story, his world becomes his small
room – the desk is the job he used to have, the couch is where he goes to feel comfortable
and secure, and the picture of the woman in furs is his human identity, which he spends a
great deal of time contemplating during his isolation. In “The Elephant Vanishes,” the
animal symbol is, of course, the elephant. It represents nature, the counterpoint to
technology or modern living (Hacht 88). When this counterpoint vanishes, everything is
knocked out of balance for the narrator, and he is unable to maintain his grasp on his
former reality. However, the elephant could represent a lot of different things as well –
wisdom, tradition, education – these are things that, when gone, drastically degrade the
quality of a society or a culture.
Both of these stories depict transformations, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The
Metamorphosis features the titular metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa into a cockroach, and
“The Elephant Vanishes” does, indeed, include an elephant that vanishes.
Transformations are often used in literature to force the reader to examine the identity of
something. For instance, Gregor is living a life where he has given up his own aspirations
to work off his family’s debt. He slaves away with little to no personal satisfaction for his
work. This could be the factor that precludes his transformation, since insects, and
especially cockroaches, could be considered base creatures, or animals with little
consequence or meaning. Yet Kafka subverts this by leading the reader to examine how
Gregor’s transformation into an insect actually grants him the ability to examine his life
and consider his own potential (Silhol 1). And so, although Gregor’s outer identity is
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completely changed, his inner identity becomes clear. This imbalance between Gregor’s
outer appearance, characterizing his working life, and his inner identity, his personal
aspirations, is what the transformation attempts to highlight as a theme. In “The Elephant
Vanishes,” the transformation is less about identity and more about the loss of something
important, and how this loss creates a fundamental imbalance in society and humanity.
The narrator puts a lot of emphasis on the concept of unity – “Unity of design, unity of
color, unity of function,” as he says (Murakami 327). However, what he really means is
uniformity, and uniformity has no balance because there is no counterpoint – everything
is the same. By emphasizing that this uniformity is what society truly wants, the
vanishing of the elephant, the loss of balance becomes clear. Although vanishing is not
the only thing the elephant does. When the narrator speaks to the editor about how he had
seen the elephant and his keeper change, he explains it by saying “’In size. Of their
bodies… The balance seemed to have changed… I had the feeling that to some extent the
difference between them had shrunk.’” (Murakami 325). The relationship between the
elephant and the keeper is used to demonstrate balance. Of course, when the elephant
disappeared, so did the keeper, because that form of balance was no longer maintaining
the world. Without that balance, neither the elephant nor the keeper could continue to
exist.
There is one more similarity in these stories. They are a criticism of their societies
in these times, Kafka in the early 20th century and Murakami in Japan’s economic boom
of the 80’s. Most important is the way they depict society’s response to the
transformation, or the fantastic elements of the story. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s
boss comes to see him when he is late for work. He, and later the two boarders, represent
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Kafka’s interpretation of society. They are utterly repulsed by Gregor, and yet, their focus
is not on the fact that he is a giant bug; it is on the fact that he and his family are morally
reprehensible in some way, and that explains why he turned into a bug (Silhol 3). It is a
reflection of a society that was quick to ostracize anyone who displayed any sort of trait
that was considered immoral by society. It was never a question of “Why did he turn into
a bug,” it was always “What horrible thing did he do that he turned into a bug?”
Similarly, in the narrator’s description of the official response to the vanishing elephant,
the police, the anchorman, the reporter, and the mother demonstrate inane, inept
responses. The civic responses are almost absurd and comical, and they show that the
modern, urban way of thinking that had developed during this time in Japan, where
commercial ventures had pushed aside the former, traditional way of living, were unable
to imagine or comprehend the fantastic and intuitive concept of the vanishing elephant
(Hacht 89-90). Perhaps the most poignant illustration of human nature in both stories is
made at the end of both stories. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor has died, and his family
takes a train to the countryside and is absolutely worry-free. In fact, they begin to
attribute all of their former problems to Gregor without any feeling of guilt or sadness.
The narrator of “The Elephant Vanishes” recounts how no one remembers the story of the
elephant saying, “The elephant and keeper have vanished completely. They will never be
coming back” (Murakami 327). These proposed ideas that society is so easily able to
forget or displace that which is inconvenient for them is a fairly harsh revelation about
human nature. For these societies, once something is either no longer around, or no
longer considered important or needed, it is easy to go on living as if it had never been at
all.
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The fact that a gap of fifty or more years separates these stories is in itself
revealing about human nature – in that, even crossing eras and land masses, humanity
faces the same problems in development and degradation. As societies become more
technologically advanced, humans stray further and further away from traditional,
cultural values and embrace a much more modern, globally accepted value. It is this
rejection of the past that destroys cultural identities and creates people who are unable to
find any sort of meaning or value in life. The world is always modernizing, and this helps
to show how these authors, who led two very different lives, could come to the same
conclusions about the world they saw. For Kafka, Prague was in the throes of
industrialization around this time, and so there was a major upheaval in the way people
were expected to work and behave. The world Murakami reflects, of 1980’s Japan, was
the result of major industrialization and westernization, also leading to an upheaval in the
way people wanted and were expected to live. These stories show that when society
changes, there is something that must be sacrificed, and more often than not that sacrifice
lies in the human spirit.
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Works Cited
Hower, Edward. "Ordinary Landscapes, Extraordinary Events." Chicago Tribune: 146.
Mar 28 1993. ProQuest. Web. 16 Dec. 2014 .
"Kafka, Franz." The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Eds. Birch,
Dinah, and Katy Hooper. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference.
2013. Web. 16 Dec. 2014
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. Trans. Ian Johnston. New York City: Fine Creative
Media, 2003. Print.
Murakami, Haruki. “The Elephant Vanishes.” The Elephant Vanishes. Trans. Jay Rubin.
New York: A.A. Knopf :, 1993. Print
Silhol, Robert. "Franz Kafka's « The Metamorphosis » : A Case Study." Psyart (2008):
9. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Oct. 2014.
"The Elephant Vanishes." Short Stories for Students. Ed. Anne Marie Hacht. Vol. 23.
Detroit: Gale, 2006. 83-107. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 16 Dec. 2014.