Empathy in Kafka and in Life

Franz Kafka’s fantastic stories of “The Metamorphosis” and “A Country Doctor” present a narrative world that not only assumes the reader’s suspension of disbelief but also requires it.  The stories require it in order to generate in readers appropriate empathy with the characters. These two acts -- (1) the willingness to engage in the narrative world and (2) the resulting emotional engagement with the characters in their relational contexts -- enable literature to foster empathy with others in a way that transcends the constraints imposed by relational life outside of literature. “The Metamorphosis” in particular facilitates in the reader a transformation of understanding by narrating Gregor Samsa’s transformation of being.

For Gregor the character, metamorphosis into a gigantic insect is actual. The reader, however, is not so transformed. Instead, the narrative perspective provides a window for the reader into what it is like for Gregor to be a gigantic insect and to navigate his family relationships in this way. A reader learns, for instance,

• that “fresh food ... had no charms for him, he could not even stand the smell of it” (Kafka 92);
• that navigation was slow and difficult because “Gregor was quite unpracticed in walking backwards” (86);
• that “if he could have spoken to [his sister Grete] and thanked her for all she had to do for him, he could have borne her ministrations better; as it was, they oppressed him” (98); and
• that although he lovingly wishes greater intimacy with Grete, Gregor “realize[s] how repulsive the sight of him still was to her, and that it was bound to go on being repulsive” (99).

Gregor the character in this sense can become someone or something else (the Other), but the reader can only know what it is like to become the Other by entering into this narrative world. Being an insect in this family is physically and psychologically difficult for Gregor, and the compassionate reader, having suspended disbelief that such a transformation can occur, both recognizes the challenges and feels pity. Gregor’s actual conversion in the narrative catalyzes the reader’s conversion of emotional imagination.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924, photo 1910)

Although physically an insect, Gregor still humanly “thought of his family with tenderness and love” (127). His metamorphosis was not as thoroughgoing as his family supposed. We see this; his parents and sister do not. That is why the story is so compelling. And it should prompt us to imagine our own relational narratives in ways that we would not have otherwise conceived them apart from this fictional narrative.

What if the story began, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed” -- not “into a gigantic insect” -- but “into a victim of a massive stroke”? What if he could not move easily, communicate clearly, or stop drooling disgustingly, but still felt deeply? If we were not induced to empathize with Gregor in his condition in the story, would we readily empathize outside the narrative with a real brother’s, son’s, or husband’s altered state? If we could not empathize with Gregor's thoughts and emotions because we are privileged as readers to know them, would we so energetically imagine what a transformed life might be like for someone for whom it was actual?

Probably not. Like Grete, we would more easily lament the hardship that this transformation imposed on us. In part the reason is that we would not have escaped our everyday trappings to grow emotionally. But having entered into Kafka’s narrative world and engaged empathetically with Gregor, we deepen our understanding of both ourselves and the two central features of what Arnold Weinstein calls “the fiction of relationship.”

First, narrative fiction is largely about relationships, both among characters and between readers and characters. Fiction, as Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” shows, freshly presents relational ties and constraints in their nuanced complexity.

Second, these relationships, especially those between readers and characters, are not given but are created. The literary composition produces these relational links, but the quality of these links is also advanced by readers’ engagement with the characters’ engagement. The fiction of relationship is created and cultivated.

Good readers will actively create the conditions conducive to these relationships by entering into the fictional frame of reference. In so doing, stories transform our perspective and actions by transforming the narrative world in which we make sense of and pursue relationships -- both within the texts and within our lives.