Eveline's Paralysis

Eveline is a typical girl that is contemplating the decision of whether to stay in her safe life that is the only one she has ever known, or to try and escape her past and run away with Frank. In keeping with the style of the Joycean Epiphany, Eveline has a sudden realization that she be happy and escape the pain of her past, only to be later brought back down to the mundane (the realization that she cannot leave). Eveline really wants to escape with Frank, but is stopped for many reasons. The first thing stopping her is that she does not actually love Frank, and the other is the realization that her past is all she has to define her character. Originally Eveline thinks Frank is the cure all to her painful and uninteresting life, but she realizes on the dock that she is who she is because of her hometown and because of her past. Moving to a new place won't change her, and if anything it will just further isolate her from any happiness of sense of place she has. Memories of the field, her mother, and her past, as well as obligations to her father and the need to keep a promise to her mother ultimately stop Eveline. Despite the fact that it is an incredibly difficult decision, Eveline's internal realization that she has too much invested in her home to ever leave it changes her originally eager run away from home into a frozen stance of paralysis.

Poor 'ol Gregor

In "The Metamorphasis", Franz Kafka creates a viewpoint that is close to a first person view from Gregor. By doing so, Kafka lets the audience sympathize and empathize with Gregor, and presents his alienation in such a light that lets the audience easily relate. By keeping the viewpoint consistently from Gregor, the audience empathizes with the attacks from Gregor's sister,
"...as it is, this creature persecutes us, drives away our lodgers, obviously wants the whole apartment to himself, and would have us all sleep in the gutter." After his sister attacks him, Gregor does not react angrily or bitterly, but instead takes reclusion into his room after expressing his good intent, "...Gregor had not the slightest intention of frightening anyone, far less his sister." Then, the audience is brought the possibility of the family heeding Gregor's pain, "His good intentions seemed to have been recognized; the alarm had only been momentary." However, our hopes are quickly shattered when, "Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily bushed shut, bolted, and locked... It was his sister who had shown such haste." Kafka uses this series of expectations and disappointments to continually empathize the audience more for Gregor, and by doing so drags us further into his crippled condition. By helping us empathize with the condition of a bug in a manner that seems as natural as a human, Kafka allows the reader to reflect on the human condition, and the many ways in which we are alienated in our own existence. It is particularly effective that Kafka uses Gregor's sister Grete as the final word that that leads to Gregor's demise. It is also somewhat ironic that Gregor is the only one truly appreciating Grete's music, but the result is Grete's disgust at Gregor. It is this discrepancy or diversion from the relationship that a fan normally has with an artist that brings into question personal intentionality and the idea of determinism. Despite Gregor's best efforts to help his family, he ultimately is powerless and continually burdensome. As Kafka relates Gregor's experiences in an empathetic manner, the audience ultimately is drawn into sympathizing with alienation of a bug, and by doing so normalizes the extravagant which reinforces the normality of alienation.

Gregor's Hard Shell.

If Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" strikes anyone as something more than an entomological fantasy, then I congratulate him on having joined the ranks of good and great readers. In his story "The Metamorphosis," Kafka presents a conventional, respectable protagonist whose life is suddenly and permanently changed by a physical disability -- a "metamorphosis," or transformation -- which catapults him out of his efficacious complacency into a sudden confrontation with the greater questions of existence. As soon as Gregor opens his eyes, he finds himself positioned in an uncomfortable manner and transformed into a monstrous vermin or a gigantic insect, a worthless creature,

"One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found
himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on
his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could
see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff
sections."

With his hard armor-plated back lying on the bed. With this arresting opening, Kafka has set his mysterious psychological fantasy in motion. Now what exactly is the "vermin" into which poor Gregor, the seedy commercial traveler, is so suddenly transformed? It obviously belongs to the branch of "jointed leggers" (Arthropoda), to which insects, and spiders, and centipedes, and crustaceans belong. But surprisingly, Gregor’s bizarre new state is not the central transformation in the novel. Instead, Kafka uses Gregor’s surreal change as a catalyst for an almost more shocking metamorphosis: that of Gregor’s family, as they move from helplessness and sympathetic fear to emancipation and hostile rejection. In fact, it is Gregor who remains largely unchanged. He struggles to maintain his daily routine during most of the story, until his body finally forces him to surrender and accept that he is no longer fully human.