Guilty Gregor & Culpable Cohn

I know that we're only a few pages into Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but while we were talking in class yesterday about Gregor's qualities as a character (human, not bug!) I kept making connections between Gregor and, of all people, Robert Cohn.

The scene where the manager is chastising Gregor through bedroom door #1 about being late to work kind of reminded me of Mike getting angry at Cohn for not being able to pick up on the social cue that he was unwanted on the trip. I think it's mostly the fact that both characters seem to get beat up on by the other people in their lives that makes me sense a connection between them. Cohn is just disliked by everyone in the novel even though they seem to agree that for the most part, Cohn is a "nice" guy. Meanwhile Gregor seems to be the poster-child for traveling salesmen and when, for the first time in five years, he's late to work, everyone flips out. Before Gregor even manages to get out of his room we have his parents insisting that something must be wrong with him if he's this late, his sister starts crying, his manager shows up eight minutes past seven, the doctor and locksmith are sent for, and who knows how worried the maid might even be at this point.

Then, with all this happening, Gregor, not seeming to completely register the many complexities of being unwilling transformed into an arthropod, worries about disappointing everyone else by not going to work (if he could only manage to catch the next train!). He feels guilty when he himself, Gregor Samsa, was thrust into this position, wronged in his own right, robbed of the duty of going to work. Why should he be feeling guilty? Now remember, Cohn the middleweight boxing champion got angry, beat Jake up, and then apologized profusely to Jake, (who says "that's alright" quite a few times as Cohn's apologizing) no doubt because he feels intensely guilty for throwing a few punches at people who didn't really like him anyway. Cohn's sense of guilt arises more out of his own perception of having been "crazy" just as Gregor's sense of guilt arises out of his own idea that he should be going to work to support his family even though he's a bug that's not physiologically capable of doing that.

Cohn's sort of alienation from from his group of "friends" and Gregor's literal and figurative alienation from his family, combined with the sense of mostly unjustified guilt that they both harbor, make Cohn and Gregor an unlikely pair of similar characters. I think it'll be interesting to see if this similarity still stands as the novel goes on.