What happens in Part III of The Metamorphosis?
Part III begins with the family's exhaustion and growing resentment toward Gregor reaching a breaking point. Grete, who was once his most devoted caretaker, finally delivers the verdict they have all been avoiding: the creature in the room is no longer her brother, and they must get rid of him. Gregor, listening from his darkened room, makes a final, conscious decision—he crawls back to his room, briefly thinks of his family with a hint of tenderness, and dies before dawn, his body dried out and light. The charwoman finds the corpse the next morning without a hint of concern and disposes of it swiftly. Mr. Samsa asks the three lodgers, who have been draining the household, to leave, and for the first time in months, the family takes a tram ride into the open countryside. The novella ends with Grete stretching in the sunlight, her parents noticing she has blossomed into a young woman—a future, implicitly, filled with marriage and renewal. The family's liberation is complete, arriving not with grief but with relief, even joy.
Analysis
Kafka engineers Part III as a study in inversion: the death scene that should mark the novella's emotional low point instead shines as its most radiant moment. Gregor's final thoughts are expressed in a remarkably gentle free indirect discourse—his mind drifts toward his family "with tenderness and love," a tone that starkly contrasts with the horror of his situation. This ironic tenderness is Kafka's sharpest tool; the reader feels deeply where the family does not.
Grete's line—"we must try to get rid of it"—marks a turning point in the novella's theme of dehumanization. She moves from calling him "Gregor" to using the neuter pronoun "it," completing a linguistic erasure that reflects the physical one. Kafka has been observing this shift in pronouns throughout all three parts; here it becomes a clear, family-wide policy.
The charwoman serves as a grotesque comic foil: her casual announcement of Gregor's death deflates any remaining solemnity. Kafka uses her to show that the world outside the Samsa flat has never acknowledged Gregor's suffering at all.
The final image—Grete stretching her body, her parents exchanging a look of quiet confirmation—captures Kafka at his most ambivalent. The family's renewal is genuine, not simply ironic; yet it comes entirely at the cost of Gregor's erasure. The tram ride into the open air echoes the window-gazing theme that tormented Gregor throughout, now finally accessible to those who survived him. Freedom, Kafka suggests, is always another's confinement made permanent.
Key quotes from Part III
“He thought back on his family with tenderness and love. His conviction that he had to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's.”
Gregor's final waking thoughts, rendered in free indirect discourse, just before he dies—the passage that crystallizes the novella's central irony of selfless love expressed through self-annihilation.
“"It has to go," cried Gregor's sister, "that's the only solution, Father. You must just try to get rid of the idea that it is Gregor."”
Grete's declaration to Mr. Samsa, marking the moment she formally strips Gregor of his name and humanity, completing the family's collective act of disavowal.
“When the charwoman arrived early in the morning—out of sheer energy and impatience she slammed all the doors, however often she had been asked not to—she found Gregor already completely still.”
The morning-after discovery, in which Kafka deliberately undercuts pathos with the charwoman's comic obliviousness, refusing the reader any conventional mourning scene.
Check your understanding
Ask about this work
The reader has this chapter in front of it — the summary, the analysis, the key quotes and the vocabulary — along with the rest of the book’s chapters. Ask what happens and why it matters, or push back on a reading.
It cites the chapter or the line it is working from, and it says so plainly when the guide doesn’t cover something. It’s instructed never to write an essay, a paragraph or an answer for you to hand in, and never to grade anything — it will show you how to approach the question instead.
Sign in to ask the reader about this work — 1 credit a message.
Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Part III
- lodgers
- People who pay rent to live in someone else's home, sharing the household — here three demanding men taken in by the Samsas for money.
- charwoman
- A woman hired to do rough cleaning work in a household, typically coming in daily rather than living with the family.
- sheer
- Pure and unmixed, with nothing else involved — here meaning the charwoman's door-slamming came from nothing but her own restless energy.
- conviction
- A deeply held and unshakeable belief or certainty about something, stronger than a mere opinion.
- tenderness
- A gentle, warm feeling of affection and care toward someone, even when circumstances are painful.
- solution
- The one answer or course of action that will resolve a problem — used here to mean getting rid of Gregor is the only way out for the family.
- get rid of
- To remove or dispose of something or someone so they are no longer present or a problem.