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Changing Relationship between Gregor and Grete in the book Metamorphosis

The Dung Beetle and the Butterfly

The Changing Relationship between Gregor and Grete in Kafka 's Metamorphosis

The writer and literary scholar Vladimir Nabokov , famous for his controversial comedy Lolita , was also a renowned entomologist . And of all peculiar insects to find their way under his magnifying glass , it was arguably Gregor Samsa , the hapless protagonist of Franz Kafka 's seminal short story Metamorphosis who finds himself transformed one day into a giant bug , that gave Nabokov the greatest taxonomic issues

As the scholar Robert Fleisner notes

Nabokov in a

Cornell lecture seriously disputed the view that Gregor is entomologically a cockroach [he] contended that the narrator is too `broad and convex ' for that . Although the charwoman designates him a dung beetle , as Nabokov reminds us , `It is obvious the good woman is adding the epithet only to be friendly (225

What Nabokov seems to have overlooked is that Kafka deliberately left the taxonomy of Gregor 's insect form as vague as possible . Harvard University 's Leland de la Durantaye writes

That Kafka himself wanted Gregor 's form to remain indistinct is made clear by a letter he sent to his publisher Kurt Wolff on October 25th 1915 , in which Kafka worries that the illustrator for the volume (Ottomar Starke ) could want to depict the insect itself . Not that : not that " Kafka politely adds that , although he does not wish to impinge upon the creative freedom of the artist , in this case "I must call upon my better knowledge...

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