Modern connotations of Gregor's “mental illness” include being in seclusion, stigma, and disability, and his father physically assaults the creature he perceives as dangerous. More subtle changes, such as sleep reversal and changes in taste (the bug eats only rotten food), and anorexia are also in evidence. Psychosis has been associated with loss of personal identity-hence a bug-and a variety of hallucinations, visual, somatic, and auditory, can be teased out from Kafka's descriptions. With disordered speech, perplexed and lost in time, but paradoxically calm and initially insightless in a nightmarish yet serene universe, the “bug” struggles on. He barricades himself in his bedroom to avoid family, and his voice changes to “animal-like”-monosyllabic and unintelligible. Its predicament could be interpreted as psychotic: dreamlike and detached from reality. Kafka describes, in colourful, evocative detail, how this initially bed bound and haplessly transformed creature tries to survive. “When Gregor Samsa awoke from troubled dreams one morning, he found that he had been transformed in his bed into an enormous bug” is Franz Kafka's superbly mesmerising opening to his novella The Metamorphosis.
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