SOURCE: “Is Gregor Samsa a Bed Bug? Kafka and Dickens Revisited,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 22, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 225-28.

In the following essay, Fleissner examines the literary origins of the insect in Franz Kafka's “The Metamorphosis.”

The title of this essay is manifestly facetious, for my donnée is that the pathetic speaker in Kafka's “The Metamorphosis” actually has no specific identity, but still can be classified validly as a “bed bug.” His “formulation” as an insect is metaphoric, and, if he can be interpreted denotatively at all, he may best be thought of as a generic byproduct of the confluence of Kant, Dickens, and Shakespeare. But mainly the throwback is to England's Shakespeare of the novel, namely the Inimitable himself.

Let us briefly review Gregor's status in the critical lab. According to John Updike's recent summary, the novelist V. Nabokov in a Cornell lecture seriously...