What Is Gregor Samsa’s Attitude Toward His Chosen Work as a Traveling Salesman? Evidence From Kafka’s Text

Gregor Samsa hates his job. In Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor calls his work as a traveling salesman “a grueling job” and says he “constantly travels” under the pressure of “the strain of traveling, worrying about changing trains, eating miserable food at all hours.” He endures it only to pay off his parents’ debt, and he dreams of quitting once he can.

The job as a mechanism of self-erasure

Kafka builds Gregor’s work life as a machine that consumes identity. The job does not merely occupy his time; it reorganizes his body, his sleep, and his speech around timetables he does not control.

The first page establishes the mechanism. Gregor wakes at 4 a.m. to catch a 5 a.m. train. He describes the “torment of traveling,” the “worrying about changing trains,” and the “irregular meals” that he calls “badly cooked.” Each item is a physical cost, not an abstraction.

The text then shows how the job trains him to suppress complaint. Gregor’s inner monologue runs a calculation: if he calls in sick, his boss will suspect him, because in five years Gregor has never once been ill. The job has made illness itself a form of insubordination.

That detail is the mechanism. Gregor does not simply dislike the work. He has internalized its demand that he demonstrate loyalty through the erosion of his body. The metamorphosis literalizes what the job was already doing metaphorically.

Quantified context: five years, one debt, a family of four

Kafka gives few numbers, but the ones he gives matter. Gregor has worked at the firm for five years. He supports a household of four: himself, his father, his mother, and his sister Grete. He has accumulated enough commission income to cover the family’s rent and to begin paying down a debt his parents owe his employer.

The debt structure is the key quantified fact. Gregor’s father owed the firm money; Gregor became the instrument of repayment. His salary is not his own. Each month’s work converts his labor into the cancellation of someone else’s obligation.

This arrangement explains his otherwise puzzling refusal to quit. He tells himself he will resign “in another five or six years” and then repay the debt in one stroke. He sets a horizon, but the horizon keeps receding. Five years in, he is still counting years.

The numbers also explain the family’s dependence. When Gregor fails to show for the 5 a.m. train, the chief clerk arrives at the apartment within an hour. The firm’s surveillance reaches into the home. Gregor’s place in society is that of a debtor’s proxy, watched and counted.

The counterintuitive detail: Gregor defends the firm while hating the job

The most revealing evidence sits inside Gregor’s own defense of his circumstances. When the chief clerk threatens him, Gregor does not attack the firm. He defends his record. He mentions his five-year unblemished service. He calls the clerk’s suspicion unfair. He even tries to protect the firm’s interests by explaining that his lateness is a temporary indisposition.

A reader might expect hatred of the employer. Kafka gives something stranger. Gregor has absorbed the firm’s judgment so completely that he argues the firm’s case against himself. He hates the “grueling job,” yet he cannot imagine a self that has not passed the firm’s audit.

The text adds a second twist. Gregor’s fantasies of escape never take the form of freedom. He imagines quitting “on the best possible terms,” with a written resignation and a bonus. The dream of leaving is itself corporate in form. The job has colonized even his utopia.

A bulleted ledger of red flags

Kafka plants symptoms early, and they function as warning signs about the job’s cost.

A 4 a.m. wake time for a 5 a.m. train, with no flexibility in the schedule. Five years of service with no recorded sick day, because illness would be read as betrayal. Meals taken “at all hours,” openly described as “miserable” and “badly cooked.” A boss who dispatches a clerk to the home when one train is missed. A debt owed by the parents but repaid through the son’s labor. A resignation fantasy that includes a bonus and a formal send-off.

Each item is a structural feature of Gregor’s employment, not a personal weakness. Together they describe a job that demands the body as collateral.

Attitude toward colleagues and strangers

Gregor’s attitude extends beyond the abstract job to the people inside it. He fears the chief clerk’s arrival and rehearses explanations. He imagines his colleagues and the clerk swapping suspicions about him. Kafka writes that Gregor’s one relief in the morning is a moment of half-sleep before his alarm, when he can briefly forget the day.

The office urchin and the eager office assistants who appear later in the story belong to Gregor’s imagination of the firm, not the firm itself. He pictures the office as an organism that never sleeps and never forgets. His attitude toward coworkers is not dislike but dread. They are the surveillance apparatus made human.

The chief clerk’s visit proves the dread correct. The clerk does not come to help. He comes to threaten, to invoke the manager’s satisfaction, and to accuse Gregor of neglecting the firm’s shipments. Gregor has no privacy before the firm’s gaze.

Even his bedroom is not exempt. The door is locked, and when it opens, it opens onto a room full of the firm’s language: work, shipments, lateness, duty. Gregor’s attitude is that of a man who cannot find a single space the job does not already occupy.

Comparison table: how Gregor frames his options

The table shows the pattern. Every practical option is closed, and the only exit Kafka leaves is the metamorphosis. Gregor does not choose transformation. The story arranges his circumstances so that no ordinary choice remains.

Timeline table: Gregor’s five years in the job

That last row is the argument. Gregor’s transformation is total. His body is no longer human. Yet his first concerns, once he can speak, are the manager’s reaction and the firm’s shipments. The job outlasts the man.

Misconceptions: what the text does not say

A common misreading treats Gregor as lazy, or as someone who resents work in general. Kafka’s text argues the opposite. Gregor is conspicuously diligent. His five years without a sick day is the job’s own ideal employee, not a slacker. The complaint is not about effort. It is about what the effort costs.

A second misreading treats the metamorphosis as a metaphor for burnout alone. The story goes further. Burnout would suggest rest as a cure. Kafka’s Gregor has already exhausted the available rest. His transformation is not a breakdown he could recover from with leisure. It is the job’s logic completed.

A third misreading casts the family as villains who betray a devoted son. The text is more exact. The family is dependent, and dependence has costs. Gregor’s attitude toward them is protective, even tender. His attitude toward the job is not. Kafka lets both facts stand without resolving them.

A fourth misreading treats Gregor as free to leave. The debt, the family, and the firm’s surveillance form a closed system. The story invites a reader to ask what freedom would even mean inside that system. Gregor cannot answer, which is the point.

Practical actions: how to read and teach the evidence

Readers who want to make this argument in an essay or a class discussion can test it against the text in four passes.

First, mark every sentence where Gregor describes the job itself. Note the verbs: “travel,” “worry,” “catch trains,” “eat.” The verbs are bodily, and they are all about movement the job dictates.

Second, mark every sentence about money and debt. Note who earns, who owes, and who repays. Kafka keeps the debt on the parents and the payments on the son. That asymmetry is the strongest structural evidence for the attitude.

Third, mark every sentence where Gregor imagines the future. Note whether the future is freedom or a better version of the job. The resignation fantasy with a written letter and a bonus is the clearest test case.

Fourth, mark the last concerns Gregor voices before he loses speech. On the first morning he asks about the manager and the firm’s shipments. The order of his worries is the order of his obligations. He has been faithful.

For readers in a professional or workplace context, the story offers a diagnostic question. Ask whether your own loyalty to a job could survive a change in your body. If the answer is yes, Kafka has described your situation too.

Limitations: what Kafka’s text cannot settle

The text does not give a dollar figure for the debt, so any claim about its size is an inference. Kafka does not name the firm, so claims about the industry are speculation. He does not report the family’s income after Gregor stops working, so claims about their motives are reconstructions.

The story also relies on a single narrator close to Gregor. Readers see the job through Gregor’s memory and worry, not through pay stubs or contracts. The evidence is strong for Gregor’s attitude. It is weaker for the objective conditions of the job.

Kafka wrote the novella in German and published it in 1915. Translations differ in wording, so quoted phrases like “grueling job” and “miserable food” vary by translator. Readers should name the translation they use when quoting, since the exact phrasing carries the argument.

The text is also literature, not clinical or economic data, and "The Metamorphosis" is a work of fiction. Any inference about actual working conditions belongs to readers’ arguments, not to Kafka’s text.