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Originally Posted by serpentbox
Yes, I remember. The apple festered in him, What is this symbolic of Kirk? You can call me Vincent if you'd like since now we're buddies.
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Thanks, Vincent--
Well, I guess it depends on what literary filter you use to analyze the text: New Critical or Reader Response. I'll take a stab.
The apple on an archetypal level could be a representation of the search for humanistic knowledge and understanding (as seen in Greek and Christian--if not other--texts). Humans desire this "food", but now Samsa--an outsider, a man forced to gain a new perspective--no longer craves the same guilty pleasure or simple human sensation. The father knows Gregor no longer desires the same things, no longer craves the guilty pleasure and reacts only as he knows how to, with violence.
Gregor, now as a disgusting insect, reflects the faults and base-human-innards of his family and the household members. The father, and others, cannot bear to acknowledge the base instinctual drives of man/personkind and, instead, forces human pleasure upon him in a violent manner, by throwing the apple at him. Thus, the apple has been consumed by Gregor (thought not through the mouth), a forced act of human consumption, the devouring of the Biblical apple. The wound festers and serves as a reminder of the intolerance of humans and their violent desire to lash out against their baseness and against their primal--and in a sense true--selves.
But--as I would tell my students--my interpretation means little. What does the text tell you? What is the author's intended effect? And, even more inportantly, how does the text here--the throwing of the apple--affect you?
Arg. Now I've done it. I'm on break from work and here I am talking shop again. Dang it!
Kirk Latimer
