PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando
TI  - Does Gregor Samsa Crawl over the Ceiling and Walls? Intra-narrative Fiction in Kafka’s <em>Die Verwandlung</em>
AID  - 10.1353/mon.2013.0031
DP  - 2013 Jun 20
TA  - Monatshefte
PG  - 278--314
VI  - 105
IP  - 2
4099  - http://mon.uwpress.org/content/105/2/278.short
4100  - http://mon.uwpress.org/content/105/2/278.full
AB  - The overwhelming majority of scholars assume that in Die Verwandlung Gregor crawls over the walls and the ceiling. The intra-narrative reality of the sticky substance (“Klebstoff”) which, according to the narrator, Gregor has in his extremities, is also taken for granted. A close reading of the text allows us to infer, however, that the purported crawling and the sticky substance are a mere product of the imagination of Gregor’s deeply perturbed mind, and that Kafka himself never took the references to the “Klebstoff” and the “Herumkriechen” seriously: they are nothing but intra-narrative fiction.Thisconclusion provides another cogent argument a contrario that Gregor Samsa is always—for the author and for the other characters in the novella—purely and simply a human being. (FB-R)