Although The Metamorphosis never directly mentions anything relating to WWI, because the work was published during 1915 and carries many themes that were prominent at the time, it is not presumptuous to assume that Kafka intended for the work to carry some war-related subtext. While several of the primary themes of the story directly relate to popular WWI literary and philosophical topics, the most prominent correlation that I saw was a commentary on the absurdity of life. This directly relates to WWI because of the colossal loss of optimism that was caused by the events of the war. This loss directly influenced the writers and philosophers of the time and led to the creation of existentialism. Kafka, of course, was an existentialist and many of the authors we've read this semester were either involved in movements that were pre-cursors to existentialism or were founders of the movement.

The most blatant reference to this absurdity is seen in the opening statement of the story; One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams , he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. Kafka is informing the reader -- with his very first sentence -- of a highly improbable, wildly irrational, totally absurd event which suggests that the story is taking place in a nonsensical universe. This realization immediately taps into the existential notion of The Absurd and grounds the work in some of the major philosophical questions of the time. The absurdity continues throughout the entire novella with the fact that the story itself never questions or attempts to explain Gregor's transformation. It never implies that this happened as some sort of punishment for bad behavior or to balance out a universal wrong. Instead, by all accounts, Gregor is a very hard worker as well as a good brother and son. There is no evidence that Gregor deserves his fate and Gregor's entire family treats the event as a random occurrence rather than a singular impossibility.

All these events together give the story an overtone of absurdity and purposelessness. They allow the reader to get a sense that this universe operates without rhyme or reason and events occur based on pure randomness rather than any kind of overarching plan or unifying idea of justice. This is compounded by the reactions that various characters have to the transformation. Most of them do not seem surprised and instead react calmly and unquestioningly to the absurd event of Gregor transforming into an insect. The very nature of the story then causes their reactions -- or lack thereof -- to be seen as absurd, because it appears as though they fully expect insane things to happen and do not really question weird events anymore. This further compounds the ridiculous tone of The Metamorphosis and completely sets it in an existentialist world, where events as horrifying and traumatizing as WWI could no longer shock a desensitized public.