Furniture = ??

     Recently our English II class is reading a story call Metamorphosis, and inside this story, the main character, Gregor Samsa transformed into an insect, but this transformation took place in the very beginning of the story, which says he woke up and realizes that he had turned into an insect.

     Gregor Samsa is a travel salesman. Although he spent most of his day doing his job, he doesn't seems to enjoys it that much. The reason that he is taking this job that he disliked so much is because he has this burden to pay his father's business debt and to support the entire family. He actually can choose not to do this tiring job if his family didn't rely on him that much. Even after his transformation, he is still worring about how to get to work and what should he take so he won't be late! Of course he realize the fact that he can't go anywhere with this body so he just stays in his room and hope that everything can go back to normal.

     As we were reading this story, we begin to see the influence of Gregor's physical body has on his mental thinking and psychology. He starts to hide under the dark sofa, and crawls on the ceiling and the walls. As a result, he realize that he is more comfortable if his room has no furniture so he can just crawls around freely. But his humanity never disappeared entirely, because he had this struggle inside his heart when he sees his mother moving the furnitures, he even ask himself, "Had he really want to transform his room into a cave, a warm room fitted out with the nice furniture he had inherited?"

Symbolism alarm!! So...

Without furniture = cave

Furniture = room

Furniture= ??

     So what is furniture according to all these "equation"?? Well, as we read on, we see how Gregor is recalling his childhood memories from these furnitures. Like the desk reminds him of the time when he was doing his assignments as a boy. As he is recalling these memories, he suddenly felt desperate to hold on to these few reminders of his childhood memories, futhermore, the memories he had when he is still a human, the memories that remind him of his humanity, so he clings to the picture of the woman muffled in fur.

     Now we know, that furniture = to humanity, the character inside of him that was not gone yet, which is also the thing that brought up the argument between our class in whether we should call him a human or a bug. But he know it himself that with the furniture inside his room, it is still his room, the place where he grew up as a boy, but without the furniture inside, he know that he will transform it into a cave, to something strange and different, although in reality it is still his room.

So we can also conclude that the room itself represents Gengor's physical body; without the humanity inside his heart, which is like the room without the furniture, he is transformed into a 100% insect, something strange and weird which is also like an empty cave inside his heart; but with the humanity still remain, like the room with the furniture, he is still a "human" somehow. In the same way, he is still him even though he is transformed into a bug, but because it is the same, we can tell the struggle inside his heart between the room, which is him as a human, and the cave, which is him as a bug. We can also see how his humanity is slowly covers up by his transformation and how it is slowly disappearing even though he is trying to hold on to it.