"He lay on his back, which was as hard as armor plate,
and, raising his head a little, he could see the arch of his
great brown belly, divided by bowed corrugations. The bed-
cover was slipping helplessly off the summit of the curve, and
Gregor's legs, pitiably thin compared with their former
size, fluttered helplessly before his eye."

Just this will give you a sense of the horror Kafka evokes
in this story, and the evocation of horror is precisely the result
of the literal presentation of the situation. Whatever Kafka
intended, his product is not satire; satire is a means whereby
irony, ridicule, and sarcasm are used to expose tyranny, vice,
folly, and stupidity; and thereby satire becomes a shortcut to
reality. But in this story, Kafka does not direct himself toward
such exposure; he is concerned only with proving that a
certain type of human being is so like a cockroach that it is
entirely plausible for him to wake up one morning and dis-
cover a natural metamorphosis has taken place. And through-
out the remainder of the story, with a world of intricate detail
concerning the various problems of a man who is a cockroach,
Kafka reiterates his thesis.

Horror and nausea are the effects Kafka's tale have on
the reader, but what is the purpose? We know that men do not
turn into monstrous cockroaches overnight, and we also know
that the German petty bourgeois, for all the despicable quali-
ties he may exhibit, is far, far indeed from a cockroach. It was
no army of cockroaches that devastated half the civilized world
--what then is Kafka's purpose? In his mind, he has performed
the equation; man and roach are the same; they are each as
worthy as the other; they are each as glorious as the other;
they cancel out--and thereby we have the whole miserable
philosophy of the "new critics," of the "new poets," of the
"avant garde" of the Partisan Review, a philosophy which,
to quote Milton Howard, in the periodical Mainstream,

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