The layout : Nabokov and Franz Kafka’s "The metamorphosis"

Abstract

The text depicting the world with the tools of absurd generated unpredictable amount of interpretation since its genesis. From the metaphoric, metaphysical, or psychologizing approaches emerges the close reading of the American writer, amateur entomologist, Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov convincingly demolishes the ingrained prejudices apropos of the famous first sentence of the short story, that the metamorphosed Gregor, as a beetle, can not be considered as a monstrous verminous bug. The essay gives further consideration to the remark from Nabokov, regarding to the doors, inspired to draw the Samsa-flat. The layout of the flat can be attempted by the stable doors, being always in the same place. The premises of the house are being arranged around the three doors opening from Gregor’s room (like the segments of the bug), which exact drawing is however not possible, because the walls and the interiors of the flat are malleable, synchronous to the metamorphosis of Gregor, they move together with the transformation of the family’s relation-system. The deconstruing space in the text conjures the labyrinths hiding monsters, capturing the characters together with the reader into the trap of imagination.