Gregor's death

Gregor's death is the decisive turning point of Metamorphosis: it ends Gregor Samsa's painful existence as a transformed and increasingly isolated body, while allowing the Samsa family to treat the apartment, their finances, and their future as recoverable. His final moments are marked not by a dramatic struggle but by exhausted stillness, a last movement of affection toward his family, and the disappearance of the physical pain that has governed his life since the transformation.

Conditions Leading to Death

Gregor's death follows a long deterioration that begins with his transformation into a horrible vermin. At the outset, he still tries to preserve the routines of his former identity: he worries about the five o'clock train, the samples he has not packed, his fifteen years of service, and the debt owed to his employer. He even interprets his altered voice as the beginning of a serious cold, an occupational hazard for travelling salesmen, rather than immediately accepting the radical change in his body. His first concern is to rise, dress, and eat breakfast, but the little legs that have replaced his arms and hands cannot obey him, and a painful collision with the bedpost reveals how completely ordinary movement has become unfamiliar.

The family's first sight of Gregor intensifies rather than resolves the crisis. When he opens the door, the chief clerk recoils, his mother collapses, and his father clenches his fists and weeps. Gregor still believes that explanation and recognition might restore him to human company, yet the family and the workplace respond to his body as a threat, a medical problem, or an animal presence. The chief clerk calls his voice that of an animal; the family summons a doctor and a locksmith; and Gregor's attempt to demonstrate responsibility by opening the lock with his powerful jaw ends in injury and exposure rather than understanding.

His expulsion back into Gregor Samsa's room makes the apartment a system of confinement. His father drives him through the narrow doorway with hissing sounds and a stick, scraping and injuring one flank before shoving him, heavily bleeding, into the room and slamming the door. Later, an apple remains lodged in his flesh for more than a month. The injury sharply reduces his mobility, leaving him like an ancient invalid who requires long minutes to crawl across the room. Although the family's patience briefly acknowledges that he remains a family member, the retained apple becomes a visible sign of the violence that has been absorbed into domestic life rather than repaired.

Food, once a sign of care, also records Gregor's decline. His sister leaves him sweetened milk with pieces of white bread because milk had formerly been his favorite drink, but he can no longer tolerate it. His appetite changes, his body becomes increasingly weak, and Grete later observes that he has eaten so little that his food came out almost as it entered. The household continues around him, but nourishment no longer reconnects him to it; the room receives his body without restoring his place within the family.

Final Moments

After Grete declares that the family must get rid of him and insists that the creature cannot be Gregor, Gregor tries to withdraw rather than frighten anyone. Even this attempt is misunderstood. Turning around is arduous because of his pain, and he repeatedly strikes his head against the floor while trying to return to his room. Once he is inside, Grete hurriedly shuts, bolts, and locks the door, announcing her relief with the word that the ordeal is finally over. The locked door thus becomes the immediate frame of Gregor's last night: he is physically within the family apartment but socially excluded from the family itself.

Gregor can no longer move at all, but the immobility does not surprise him. He feels that movement on his spindly legs had itself been unnatural, while the pain throughout his body slowly weakens. The apple in his back and the inflamed area around it have become nearly insensible, covered in white dust. This bodily numbness gives the scene its subdued finality: death arrives through the fading of sensation rather than through a final assault.

His thoughts turn to the family with emotion and love. He feels that, if departure is necessary, he must go away even more strongly than Grete had said he should. The statement reverses the family's accusation that the creature is persecuting them or trying to take over the flat. Gregor's last inward movement is not toward revenge or self-defense but toward removal from the household that can no longer accommodate him. He remains in peaceful rumination until the clock tower strikes three in the morning; as the light begins to spread outside the window, his head sinks down without his willing it, and his last breath leaves weakly through his nostrils.

Discovery and Recognition of the Corpse

The death is discovered by the charwoman early in the morning. She is accustomed to making noise with the doors and carries a long broom, so she first assumes that Gregor is lying still deliberately and playing the martyr. She tickles him from the doorway, then pokes him, and only understands what has happened when his body can be pushed across the floor without resistance. Her blunt announcement that he is dead converts the ambiguous transformed body into a corpse through external examination and physical handling.

Mr. and Mrs. Samsa rise in shock, while Grete is already fully dressed, her pale face suggesting that she has not slept. The parents enter Gregor's room, and the three women follow the father's religious gesture after he gives thanks to God. This response combines relief, ritual, and emotional disturbance. Mrs. Samsa begins as if she might restrain the broom, yet does not complete the movement; Gregor's corpse is already being treated as something that can be moved and disposed of rather than as a living son who might still require care.

Grete looks closely at the body and remarks on how thin he has become. The corpse is dried up and flat, no longer raised on its little legs and no longer capable of making the family look away. In death, the transformed body becomes legible in a new and more final way: the family's last explanation is starvation and physical exhaustion, while the evidence of the apple, the injuries, and the prolonged confinement remains materially present but is not openly discussed.

Immediate Consequences

Gregor's death immediately reorganizes the apartment. The charwoman opens the window wide, and the fresh air carries some warmth because it is already the end of March. The open window contrasts with the locked room and the closed doors that had defined Gregor's confinement, but this new air does not restore him; it accompanies the removal of his body and the reestablishment of household circulation.

The three lodgers, who have been living in the apartment, emerge looking for their forgotten breakfasts. After they are shown Gregor's corpse, Mr. Samsa orders them to leave his home. The tenants' departure is direct and uncompromising: the family no longer needs to negotiate with them, and the lodgers' economic authority over the household collapses alongside Gregor's death. They leave with their hats and sticks, descending the many steps while the Samsa family quickly loses interest in them. The death therefore removes two forms of pressure at once: Gregor's dependent body and the lodgers whose rent had helped structure the family's desperate domestic arrangement.

The charwoman's casual treatment of the body also shows that the death has entered the logic of household labor. She claims that the problem of getting rid of the thing in Gregor's room has already been settled, though Mr. Samsa prevents her from describing the details. Her lack of solemnity clashes with the family's shock and religious gesture, yet it is consistent with the transformation of Gregor into an object of cleaning and disposal. Mr. Samsa then says that she will be dismissed, but his anger cannot undo the practical reduction of Gregor's death to a task the household must complete.

Restoration and Significance

After the lodgers leave, Mr. Samsa calls his wife and daughter to him, and the three embrace before finishing their letters. They then leave the flat together, something they have not done for months, and take the tram into the open country outside the town. Their movement outward marks a sharp contrast with Gregor's final immobility in the darkened room. The family speaks of its prospects and discovers that all three now have jobs with good promise; they also begin planning a smaller, cheaper, better-located, and more practical apartment.

Grete's change is the clearest sign of the future opened by Gregor's death. Her cheeks, previously pale from worry, become livelier as the family discusses its prospects, and Mr. and Mrs. Samsa recognize that she is blossoming into a well-built and beautiful young lady. Their attention shifts toward finding a good man for her, and she is the first to rise and stretch when they reach their destination. The ending thus converts death into a social and economic release for the survivors, but the release is morally disturbing because the family's renewed future depends on the disappearance of the member who had once worked to pay his parents' debt and support them.

Gregor's death completes the story's movement from recognized son and travelling salesman to unintelligible body, confined invalid, and finally disposable corpse. During life, the family continues to call him a family member even while excluding him from language, meals, rooms, and mutual life; after death, the corpse is handled as an obstacle, the lodgers are expelled, and the family resumes public movement. The ending does not simply state that Gregor has ceased to live. It shows how quickly a household can translate a person's disappearance into restored order, new housing, employment, and marriage prospects, leaving the reader to confront the gap between the family's practical relief and Gregor's last act of love.