Heftel, Christian (Utah Valley University)
Faculty Advisor: Abbott, Scott (Humanities and Social Sciences, Integrated Studies)
The story of Oedipus and the Sphinx establishes man as an upright, standing creature who is defined, at least in the prime of his life, by his ability to stand and walk on two legs, having ceased using his arms for locomotion. The corollary to this is that things that cannot stand, or that have a different number of limbs, are definitionally inhuman. In "The Metamorphosis," Franz Kafka introduces a character who wakes up having gained a myriad of small, insectoid legs and having lost the ability to stand upright. Throughout the story, the author repeatedly draws attention to Gregor's new, strange limbs, emphasizing their inhumanity and their inability to support him bipedally. At the same time, the story repeatedly describes its human characters in terms of the actions of their arms and legs, the limbs which make bidepality possible.
This paper explores the contrast between Kafka's human and inhuman characters through the lens of the standing metaphor established in the Oedipus myth. It examines the points of similarity between Gregor's metamorphosis and Athanaeus's and Apollodorus's accounts of the Sphinx's riddle. In the end, it suggests that Kafka uses the notion of bipedality to emphasize not only the physical inhumanity of Gregor Samsa, but also the inhumaneness of his family.