What happens in Part II of The Metamorphosis?
In Part II, the Samsa household reluctantly adjusts to Gregor's horrifying new reality. His sister Grete steps into the caregiver role, sliding plates of spoiled food under his door and figuring out what he will and won’t eat through trial and error. Meanwhile, Gregor finds an odd joy in crawling along the walls and ceiling, prompting Grete to clear out his room of furniture to give him more room. Their mother, seeing the empty space, breaks down—unable to accept that her son’s human life has been erased—and faints. Amid the chaos, Gregor scuttles into the living room, further frightening her. When their father returns home from his new job as a bank messenger, he misinterprets the scene and drives Gregor back to his room with a shower of apples, one striking him in the back and starting to fester. The wound goes untreated. The family's initial shock has turned into weary resentment: the father sleeps in his uniform, the mother sews lingerie for a fashion house, and Grete works as a shop girl. Gregor, overhearing their conversations through the wall, realizes he has become a financial and emotional burden, and that the family's fragile unity relies solely on their unspoken agreement to avoid discussing his transformation.
Analysis
Kafka engineers Part II as a study in the slow violence of domesticity. The furniture-removal scene is the chapter's turning point: what starts as Grete's practical kindness—giving the insect room to roam—turns, in the mother's eyes, into an act of annihilation. Kafka uses the wardrobe and writing desk as symbols of memory, representing Gregor's former identity, and their removal makes the family's unconscious desire to forget him all too clear. The passages where Gregor crawls along the ceiling are the most formally adventurous in the chapter: Kafka describes Gregor's new body with sensory detail ("a pleasant, floating sensation") while simultaneously revealing that this freedom is merely compensatory.
The father's act of throwing apples serves as Kafka's most condensed symbol. The fruit—Edenic, domestic, absurdly comic—becomes a weapon, and the apple that lodges itself in Gregor's shell remains there, a festering reminder of paternal violence disguised as discipline. The father's uniform, which he insists on wearing even to sleep, indicates the family's new performance of respectability: they are all, in various ways, donning costumes now.
Tonal control is Kafka's sharpest technique here. The narration aligns closely with Gregor's perspective but avoids sentimentalizing it; his eavesdropping on the family's financial discussions is presented with the same detached tone as his realization that he prefers cheese rinds over fresh milk. The chapter concludes with a mood of sealed mutual incomprehension—each character suffers, yet none can express it.
Key quotes from Part II
“Had he really wanted to transform his room into a naked den in which he would certainly be able to crawl around unhindered in all directions but would simultaneously have to forget, rapidly and totally, his human past?”
Gregor, watching Grete and his mother strip his room of furniture, suddenly turns against the plan he had initially welcomed.
“His father looked hostile, and clenched his fists as if wanting to knock Gregor back into his room.”
The father returns home in his bank-messenger uniform to find Gregor in the living room and his wife collapsed on the floor.
“Gregor's serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month—the apple remained embedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir, since no one dared to remove it.”
The narrator records the aftermath of the father's attack, noting the family's collective refusal to tend to Gregor's injury.