Brandon Ong 12/13/15
Mr. Waddell B Block
Gregor’s Awkward Family Photo Project
Brandon Ong 12/13/15
Mr. Waddell B Block
Gregor’s Awkward Family Photo Project
In my rendition of an awkward family photo following the theme of the Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, a standard family portrait is given a twist as their is a bat in the top right corner. This bat represents Gregor: alienated, and, to the average viewer, ridiculously out of place. I chose a bat instead of an insect, as the story depicts, for a bat lives in darkness and also do the themes of isolation and loneliness justice. Indeed, although the family structure is different from that of Gregor’s in that there is an additional member to the family, the body language of the boy and the sister, who represents Grete, further plays on the theme of isolation, as a boy, is sitting closely to his sister with his left arm propped up on her shoulder in a sibling-love like fashion. Gregor, meanwhile, is lonely hovering in the corner. As the story goes, Grete was the person that Gregor most cared about and who showed the most care for Gregor during the initial stages of his metamorphosis. This photo, then, with the distance between Grete and the bat(Gregor), being so great, was taken following Gretes heartbreaking declaration that Gregor is no longer Gregor but simply a bat. The father is also seen as being more in shape, as a result of having been going to work in place of Gregor in order to support the family. The purpose of this picture, done through photoshop, is to serve as a physical depiction of how the family would have looked like, for in one’s mind, the mental image created of a giant insect living among humans is already outrageous. When one finally goes to the extent of creating a physical representation of what Kafka describes, one can finally see how truly ridiculous the entire situation is.
