SOURCE: "Kafka's Metamorphosis and Modern Spirituality," in Tri-Quarterly, No. 6, 1966, pp. 5-20.

In the following essay, Greenberg examines The Metamorphosis as the dying lament of a spiritually vacant modern man.

The mother follow'd, weeping loud,
 'O, that I such a fiend should bear!'

—Blake

In the Middle Ages it was the
 temporal which was the inessential
 in relation to spirituality; in the
 19th century the opposite occurred:
 the temporal was primary and
 the spiritual was the inessential
 parasite which gnawed away
 at it and tried to destroy it.

—Sartre

Kafka's Metamorphosis is peculiar as a narrative in having its climax in the very first sentence: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." The rest of the novella falls away from this high point of astonishment in one long expiring sigh, punctuated by three sub-climaxes (the...