Response..

Thanks for all of the comments and questions everybody! Normally, I would have posted my response as another comment, but apparently I don't have access to post comments on my own blog... so here it goes:

Dania and Hannah,

Kafka never explains why Gregor’s metamorphosis –and yes, he does actually take the permanent physical form of an insect—takes place, nor does Gregor ever attempt to discover why it happens. He treats it the same way that any one of us would treat a typical cold, with mild disregard.

To answer Dania’s final question: yes, it was the actions of Gregor’s family that embodied the limits of human sympathy. They could only deal with Gregor for so long before they began to neglect him and put other affairs before his needs. By the end of the story (which only encompassed a couple of months) his family had come to the agreement that they must to get rid of the burden Gregor that had become.

Emily,

I wouldn’t necessarily say that the story lacked or deemphasized tone… It was actually one of the most important devices used. Kafka’s neutral tone shows sobriety and frankness, which tells us that he doesn’t think anything extraordinary of Gregor’s metamorphosis, or events like it. This, in turn, suggests that he believes our lives to be so filled with chaos and irrationality that nearly anything can be regarded as mundane. I believe that it is his failure to present an emotional response [that readers see] befitting to the situation that leads us to misinterpret his sobriety for apathy.

So, what I’m getting at is this: the piece doesn’t lack tone; it’s full of it. It does, however, lack the emotional charge that a common person would expect, leading us to believe that the author has no distinct attitude towards the subject, even though this isn’t at all true. Sorry if my original post was misleading…

Gregor’s death came as a result of his family’s neglect (they had nearly stopped attending to him altogether) and the psychological stresses of the metamorphosis. Gregor was struggling to reconcile the conflict between his mind, which was human, and his body, which was insect-like.  Gregor spent the last hours of his life thinking about how burdensome he has been, and wishing that he could disappear so that his family didn’t have to deal with him anymore.

Annais,

Bugs are gross. Just sayin'.

But on the real, I think his reason for choosing to use such a form was to create the strangest situation possible and subject it to a neutral telling. This choice further illuminates Kafka's perspective on the world we live in by adding significantly to the chaos and absurdity of the story's premise, while eliciting no emotional response from the narrator. No one would expect that a story about turning into a disgusting cockroach (the description of Gregor highly resembled that of a cockroach, though it wasn't explicitly stated) could be told with such an emotional disconnect.