I think kafka did not want anyone to draw an insect and he said that it should be seen nowhere around the book is because gregor did not actually become a vermin or an insect. Maybe it is how he felt he was and how his family saw him. We can see from the first chapter when the chief clerk comes he mentions that Gregor was failing his job calling it “unsatisfactory “. And in his long speech he accuses him of causing unnecessary trouble and neglecting everything- his job and his family. This is usually said to people who are depressed and don’t want to do anything anymore. It is as if they can’t pull themselves together and have become some kind of a vegetable. So maybe kafka could have written gregor had become a rotting vegetable as well. It is not the point, it is about him unconsciously giving up on life. Depressed people although they care about people dear to them and want to change themselves can never do it. If we take out the vermin part and imagine he had just become depressed and as a result, he is on a subconscious or unconscious strike, i don’t know, where he doesn’t clean his room (it happens a lot to people who are depressed, they don’t wash dishes for months and their room starts to smell really bad, and they cannot do the most routine things in life and hate them more because of it, here we could parallel it with gregor living some kind of fluid every he walks and making everything dirty), doesn’t take a shower(he smells), doesn’t change his clothes, doesn’t even brush his teeth, i believe his family would have acted the same. They think that the depressed person is just being lazy and not taking life seriously. That is why his father is following him around the house and throwing apples at him. It is a typical father reacting to his son who just let himself go and doesn’t want to change his situation (i mean the son who doesn’t want that). Like he could just pull himself together and get himself out of tye depression(transform himself into a human), and start working amd bringing money, but the son would just not do anything. Also the sister is at first understanding of him, since she had also not been doing anything before for the family and is insecure about it as well. She is like yes we are the same. You gave up on your duties, on your work and yourself, i understand you, but i will also use this chance to prove myself to the family now that i can also be useful. So she starts to take care of him when no one wants to. Not because she cares about his depressed brother, but because it is her chance now to seem better than him. Although the author says quite a few times that greta cares about him, eg when she took the furniture out because he needed space, i think it is her way of encouraging his depression as she wants him to continue living (or just existing) liek that and to never recover. And if you wonder how one might be disgusted by a depressed person to the point of wishing him dead, it actually is possible. When you have one family member who was been providing for the family before and now just stopped because of some untreatable and not even visible disease, you start to show understanding first. but later on you start to become impatient as if they are doing it on purpose. You feel like a lot of people would have overcome their depression at some point and started living “normally” again. But it seems like this person just gave up. They never leave their room, never talk to people, lost their job, never clean their room, never even wash themselves. You do get disgusted and wish they were never part of your family to begin with. So that you could join back the normal family category and not the family with an ill son, whose illness is not even real, as you think.
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