Intro
Franz Kafka had quite a wild imagination. And a lot of distrust of early twentieth-century society. How else could someone dream up a story about a guy who wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a huge cockroach? (At least, we think it's a cockroach. Kafka doesn't totally specify. Anyway it's some sort of icky bug.)
Metamorphosis is considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century literature. And rightly so. Why? Well, the Formalists would say because it's got so much defamiliarization going on. It's a story that messes with your head. And your perception. And that starts right from the very beginning.
Quote
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. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.…
Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad. "How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense," he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn't get into that position. However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was. He must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that he wouldn't have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before.
Analysis
These first paragraphs of the Metamorphosis scream defamiliarization (and with a nightmare like Greg's, you'd be screaming, too). That's because Kafka is defamiliarizing everything and anything. Everything ordinary is turned into something extraordinary. A man becomes a bug: this defamiliarizes the man. We, as readers, are forced to look at this guy Gregor (and therefore people in general), and see him (and everyone) as vermin.
Whoa. Are we all really no more than bugs? Well, in the grand scheme of the universe, we kind of are. Maybe even less than bugs. How's that for a boost to your confidence?
And even the bug is defamiliarized. What's our reaction when one of those creepy-crawly-antenna-y guys flies into our face? Scream, dodge, or, if we're brave, take a swat with a handy shoe. But, as some of your vegan friends might have said to you in your past, what if these bugs are just, like, little people running around? What if that cockroach in the kitchen is your brother? Sure, sometimes we want to toss a shoe at our brother's head. But you get the point.
Next step: by making a person into a bug, and a bug into a person, Kafka is defamiliarizing both. He's forcing us to look at both things with fresh eyes—whether we have two or a buggy million—with a new understanding. And that's exactly what the Formalists are talking about when they say that the goal of a writer is to make the familiar unfamiliar.