Note: Sometime I write about things other than geography and environment. The piece below originally appeared last week at TheCaregiverSpace.org, under the title “A reading of Kafka’s Metamorphosis from the point of view of a caregiver for a person with severe chronic disease“.
What if the insect pest carapace in which Gregor Samsa finds himself one morning were read as a metaphor for debilitating chronic disease? Years ago, the first time I read Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, all I retained was the shock value of the weird story of a young man discovering himself as a giant bug, crawling the walls, disgusting the family. Four decades later, as father of a young man bedbound with very severe ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), I read it again. The story knocked the floor out from under me. Not just for the uncanny parallels between my son and Gregor’s situation, but for the transformation in his family that ultimately leads them to abandon him and rediscover joy, normality, and a future. I shudder at the idea of abandoning my son. It is an utter impossibility. And yet… that dream of a future, an escape hatch, allowed me to at least think around the unthinkable, to acknowledge those emotions.
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Posted by christiankull 