Building Gregor's Room

Unique Perspectives

After finishing Kafka's The Metamorphosis, we had to construct Gregor's Room with only copy paper and ink: the bed, Gregor himself, and one other item of our choosing. In class we discussed how we viewed the bedroom and I loved it because everyone's responses were so different. One person imagined the room having a very large window, the blue sky beyond contrasting powerfully with Gregor's imprisonment. Another person saw the space with sharp angles and slanted walls, like an attic room, rather than the average four-wall square. We debated Gregor's size, the meaning of the boarders in the suits, and the texture of the different characters (maybe Gregor's sister is both prickly and smooth, "like an Egyptian mouse" someone said). I felt like I was in a very artsy version of one of my English literature classes.    

One reason The Metamorphosis is such a classic work is because it lends itself to so many interpretations. While reading, we fill in the details Kafka leaves out with our own; though there are clues in the text about the size of Gregor, for instance, his actual situation remains unknown and unquantified. It's like when someone tells a story featuring a relative or professor or classmate you've never seen, and by the end of it, you have a clear image in your head of what this person must look like even though few details were given. Seeing what everyone came up with for their personal "set designs" opened me up to countless new ways of interpreting the text. 

Process Pictures (or lack thereof)

  

Although I thought I had taken at least a couple w.i.p. pictures, this is the only one I could find from this project. I know I didn't take many because the frustrations of soaking, and baking, and not being able to use adhesives of any sort gave me a one-track mind: GET THIS THING DONE. In this photo, however, you can see the tubes I created to stuff inside the mattress and box spring. I gave them so much detail because my plan was to rip the mattress and box spring to reveal the structure underneath, giving it a "bare bones" feeling. To the far right, you can also see the Tupperware container where I soaked my paper overnight.

Final Pieces

Gregor

Gregor's Bed

The violin

At the beginning of the story, Gregor's room seems to be a neatly structured space; after his transformation, however, I imagine the room speedily denigrating into a dirty, tattered, virtually unlivable place. One reading of Kafka's story is that Gregor is mentally ill, that his world is and will forever be colored by that fateful morning when he "turns" into a bug. I wanted my pieces to reflect Gregor's deteriorating mindscape, so I used bright colors mixed with dull ones to indicate confusion, ties to hold things precariously together, and animalistic elements - blood, feces, and prints - to accent the very real, very dehumanizing aspects of mental illness.

While my first instinct was to create a bug-like creature to represent Gregor, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I saw his character as a lack rather than a tangible form. I constructed Gregor's briefcase, the one he would have taken with him to work had he woken up human, and made it into something grotesque. The edges are sharp, the inside littered with garbage, and the outside marked by black fingerprints and brown stains. A small black ball is, so to speak, Gregor's "essence" - the shrinking of his mind and soul into something so tiny and insignificant it could easily disappear, never to be found again (as it did when my project fell down the stairs at my apartment!). I also held the two compartments of the briefcase together with my homemade "twine," a motif which carried over during my construction of the bed.

As I mentioned earlier, I imagined Gregor's room to be a very disgusting space. On his too-small blanket (whose size represents the comically pathetic distortion of life caused by mental distress) I attached pieces of poo through a careful method of wrapping in wet paper strips and then securing with two paper fasteners on the other side of the blanket. In order to created the box spring and the mattresses, I both folded the paper and secured the forms with my twine. 

The notion of everything falling apart and away from each other guided my project. For the piece of my choosing, I decided to construct Gregor's sister's violin. I found this object to be so significant because it is his sister's music that draws Gregor out of the darkness and into the family room where his mother, father, and boarders listen to her play. Music is an undeniably powerful force - maybe it's what makes us human. Even the violin, however, becomes a source of oppression for Gregor. Although it is beautiful, it is still grotesque. I soaked the strips of paper in tea and stuck an errant string into the top of the violin. Like a body itself, the violin has a long, parched neck and a wound on its bottom. Its curves have become rough, and its backside is similarly coming undone.

Assembling the Bed

A place that can comfort.

Or destroy.