This is a list of themes I made for lectures and below is a quote from an article on marxist theory

applied to Metamorphosis.

Metamorphosis Themes:

Mental illness - overworked, anorexia (loss of appetite), victim of abuse, anxiety, social isolation,
fatigue, schizophrenia, stroke, depression, hated his job, under pressure to support his family.

Gender Roles and expectations

The human condition/ Anxiety of Modern man

Human being's deterioration and death in a materialist society

Purposelessness or Absurdity of Life

Guilt and Shame

Materialism and Capitalist Society, Commodification

Alienation from Society, Isolation

Loneliness

Selfishness of Human beings

Criticism on Family as an institute

A Human's need for love

From the Marxist view, the process of the metamorphosis symbolizes the class struggle of the
proletariat to break out of a life of being exploited. Such representation is displayed in the similarity
between the causes, natures, and endings of Gregor’s transformation and those of proletarian
struggles. Thus, through the Marxist critical lens, it becomes clear, that Gregor’s financial
enslavement was the result of his society’s, and his family’s, adherence to “consumerism” (Tyson
58), “commodification” (Tyson 60) and to the achievement of the ‘capitalist dream’ — modified from
the term: the “American dream.

He had ‘bought’ them “prosperity”, “contentment” and even “peace” (the one thing that the poor
should himself didn’t have) by way of his job and salary. Therefore, these essential concepts were
now equated to having money, a job, having a big apartment, having servants, and having the leisure
to simply sit around all day reading the newspaper — for nobody in the Samsa family had a job while
Gregor did. Those concepts are assigned exchange and sign-exchange values, thus, the concepts
themselves are commodified’, by the family, and by Gregor himself it seems. “Commodification”
(Tyson 60) is an “capitalist ideal” (Tyson 58), which “is the act of relating to objects or persons in
terms of their exchange value or sing-exchange value” i.e the social prestige the object confers upon
the user (Tyson 60).