2016 The Metamorphosis…. Revisited…
American OIB class Lycée International Nelson Mandela, Nantes. 01/11/2016
When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous bug in his bed. Zack, Gabriel & Hector The covers seemed to have multiplied in weight and size so that he was trapped under an endless sea of bed blankets. Eventually he found out with astonishment that his legs could stick to walls, he used this quality to his advantage as ran down the side of his bed escaping what seemed to be a deadly fall. Gregor walked out of the room under the locked door. His thoughts seemed to fleet instantly from his mind, he could not manage to focus on an idea. He wandered aimlessly around his enormous house, trying desperately to think of a solution, of an idea, of a plan, of anything! After coming to the kitchen, he decided to try to call his mother. He arrived in the living-room, he saw his mother, she was enormous, gargantuan and her feet were so massive. He tried to call her. He shouted, shouted again and again but with no result, his mom couldn’t hear him. Later on, he became so hungry that he decided to search for food. He went outside to search the garbage can, but he was too tiny and couldn’t jump into it. Hopefully, he found a little gutter where he could climb and reach the garbage. Once he reached the top of this massive obstacle, he couldn’t believe it! It was as empty as his sore stomach… At that precise moment, he realized his life was about to stop. He was thinking of attempting suicide so that his death wouldn’t be too brutal. He tormented himself so much that he decided to go to the middle of the road and pray for a car to run over him. As minutes came by, he finally saw a dazzling flash of light far away. He closed his eyes, but he was so anxious. Gregor Samsa had been run over by a red truck and died. Camille, Macha & Leontine “What happened to me?” Gregor thought. He tried to remember what he had eaten the previous day but he could not remember anything, the only thing he recalled was waking up to a big surprise. He got out of bed, looked at himself in the mirror and then hurried downstairs to search his bin for traces of the food he might have had for dinner. Nothing.
He had to make a decision, but he couldn't just walk out the door looking like a cockroach. Suddenly, a fabulous idea came to him, he was going to make it seem as if he was dressed up for a party. He got ready and headed for the doctor’s. People in the street turned around, stared at him. He tried to act as it was just a fancy dress, but it was a nightmare. When the doctor saw him, he seemed really confused and didn’t know what to do. The doctor said this couldn’t be because of the food he had eaten. Gregor was desperate to find an answer. He went back home, sad and hopeless. Now, all he could do was go home and hope that he would wake up the next morning as a human being again. He left the doctor and tried not to cry as he came out of the building. People were still staring, it seemed to him that they were looking even more. Someone turned around and said “Hey man, it’s not Halloween yet!” That was it, he couldn’t pretend anymore, he burst out into tears and wailed in the middle of the street. Mothers were covering their children’s eyes and avoiding him, changing pavements. He sobbed as he walked home. As he got home, he wasn’t hungry at all so he just went to bed, praying that this nightmare would be over the next morning. Unfortunately, he couldn’t fall asleep. He tossed and he turned in his bed but he felt like he’d lost his head. He couldn’t deal with it anymore, he repulsed himself, there was a huge cockroach in his bed but he couldn’t kill it, it was him… The next day, he was still a cockroach. Noah, Emile & Thomas He thought that he was still dreaming and tried to wake up, but he couldn’t. He wasn’t dreaming. All of this was true. He didn’t know what to do and so he didn’t want to come out of his bed. Hoping that he would just go back to normal in a few minutes. But he didn’t. He heard his mum walking towards his bedroom and started panicking. So he jumped out the window, not knowing what he was doing, and broke his toe. It hurt a lot, but he still ran away, hoping that he was going to go back to normal in a few hours. That day, he just hid in a forest close to his home, and wandered around on a path. He still was a cockroach when night fell, so he decided to sleep outside, in the forest, under a tree.
But suddenly, in the darkness of the night, while he was wide asleep, an unbearable pain hit his head, the pain was too much… He could not handle it, it was so strong that he fainted. When he woke up he was in his bed with his normal body, normal hands, but weirdly his toe was still aching. He violently shook his head to wipe the horrible dream off his mind. He reached for the door and as soon as he opened it the world as he knew was gone. It was total darkness, utter darkness. Then, after what felt like hours, he saw a blue circle coming towards him, slowly out the circle came a potato which said hi. They talked about their lives during the whole night, the potato said it used to be a woman but this morning, when it had woken up, it had been turned into a potato. When he told it his story, they did not understand why the potato had not changed back into a woman as he had done. The next day he was so proud of having a potato friend that he showed it to all his family and his human friends but he was also hoping for his friend to turn back into a woman because he felt like he was falling in love with it but nobody would let him love her. Lucie & Taïs [...] First of all, he did not understand why he had become so small, then, he looked at his hands, well at its tiny “paws” now... and started wondering: ‘What happened to me? ’ He ran immediately to the bathroom in order to see his face in the mirror. He was facing the sink and realized with horror that he was by far, too little to reach the mirror! He screamed. Well, it was a sort of a scream... He screamed so hard but nobody could hear him. Indeed no sound came out of his poor little cockroach’s throat. He panicked and ran to the kitchen to see Katlyn, his lovely wife. In his panic, he unfortunately did not remember that he was not a human being anymore. When he arrived in the kitchen, Katlyn was not the lovely wife he had met in the past, but a MURDERER!!! Indeed she tried to hit him with her blue brush (her favorite one). He escaped, but she managed to hurt him. Courageously, he ran and reached a hole, where he could take his breath back. It was gloomy, dark and cold inside. He was alone and sad. Gregor was thinking that he was condemned to stay in this disgusting cockroach form until the end of his life. He thought
about the shorter life that he would now have, first of all because his wife wanted to kill him, then because of all the traps in his apartment, and finally, because insects do not have a long life at all in general. He was young and wanted to live!!! He was very nostalgic and depressed. All of a sudden, he realized that he was very thirsty and remembered that he had left a glass of water next to his comfortable bed, in his bedroom, the place where all this story had begun…. He ran as quickly as possible to his bedroom, climbed over the table to have access to the glass, then over the glass, but at the top of it, he felt somehow peaky. He fell in the water, and at the second he touched the surface, Gregor Samsa woke up startled in his bed. He looked carefully at his hands, and was pleased to see that he had resumed his normal size. “What an awful dream!!!” he thought. He went to the kitchen to take his breakfast with his lovely wife and even though he was voiceless about his strange dream, he decided to tell her the whole story. Inès, Martin & Bassma He started to panic, everything was immense and huge, his bed usually was a bit too small, and now it was like a vast area of pillows and blankets. He kept repeating to himself that it was a bad dream and he’d wake up soon, so he closed his eyes a while, but nothing changed. The most strange and unrealistic in its transformation was how suddenly it could’ve happened. He prepared himself to go to work and left. While doing this, he remembered that he was supposed to go to work, he ran over an immense blanket and tried to move the wings the metamorphosis had given him and he flew away. “When he woke up again” it was half past twelve, and his neighbor Miss Lawrence would arrive in several minutes. Would she kill him? But why should she kill him? After all, she would only think that Gregor was not at home… Perhaps, she wiould be angry… Honestly, Gregor did not really care about it. Indeed, the wings which replaced his arms were his biggest problem. It was not the right time to eat tacos at a restaurant! The fear he felt which was contained suddenly came out with an incredible strength. His “logical” mind could not accept the reality but the facts were there. He saw the world (and especially the
room, in fact) from another point of view and not only because of his new size. Benoît, Kylian & Theo He was horrified, and all he could do was scream in a very strange way, because he had fallen asleep on his back and could not get up. After an hour of trying to get up, he managed to roll onto the floor, and started to run in the bedroom. He succeeded in opening the door and ran to the kitchen to try and find someone human to help him. However, after having left his bedroom, he noticed that beyond the door was a tremendous room in which there was a bed, on which a man was lying; although he should have been sleeping, he had a large book in his hand. The transformed man -many kilometers after- walked to see what was written on the book, saw the title. Actually, everything was strange since he had awoken that day. Who was that man lying on the bed? He didn’t know. He tried to escape the room, run away wherever he could hide from other human beings, far, far away from his home. Louise, Iulia & Esha Trying to get up, he realized that since he had slept on his back, he was stuck to the bed, bound by that invisible force that we call Gravity. He started squirming, seeing the hours pass by, soon arrived the time to go to work, but he still hadn't gone back to his human form. Not knowing what to do, he came to think... Well...positively thinking, he couldn’t go to work, which he had always hated. Lying in bed, maybe even dying in a few seconds, might just be better than living and working with those unbearably boring colleagues of his, whom he had never liked anyway. He had never been curious enough to know how long it took for a cockroach to die, indeed, it was a generally useless information. One...two...twenty-four hours? Or might he have to agonize on his bed for longer? Then a sudden thought came to Gregory’s mind. What if someone should come? And fling him off the bed? He might survive! Or die sooner under the foot of a genuinely scared person.
But he had to keep his head up, that is, if he could. Just because one morning, he had woken up as a cockroach didn’t mean he had to act like one, worrying, wondering and expecting death. However, having six legs and a flat, oval shaped body left him with no choice. Certainly speaking, all he could do was spend his day as the mini beast and face whatever was coming his way. Allan, Kostia & Dara When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed. The gentleman almost past out after this horror vision. “Is this real” he asked himself, “How can it be?” Truth is, there are no explanations for what happened during this mysterious night. He thought about everything, magic, genetics, diseases… nothing made sense. He was a man stuck in the body of a disgusting and horrifying cockroach. What could he do? He started trying to get used to his new body he could not even stand up. He was falling on a shell body which made him feel no pain. He started to feel immortal. A couple hours after this rough waking up, he could walk and he could nearly run. It took him a few more hours to completely get used to his new body, now he had control and Gregor did not trip over anymore. But just because Gregor knew his new body did not mean he liked it, he needed to find out who or what did this to him. He did not waste much time to set out on his journey (besides taking half an hour to figure out how to open his front door) but he soon realized that he was not a human sized cockroach but a normal sized cockroach in the middle of a thousand humans! He made a rush for his house but got squashed in a matter of seconds and at this point he woke up dripping in ice cold sweat and in a human body. Anne, Elisa & Zoé When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed. He was horrified! He looked at his body, it was atrocious. He tried to speak but the only sound coming out of his detestable little mouth was an unpleasant noise.
He was horrified. What was happening to him? Was that a nightmare? He needed answers so he ran to his bathroom and looked at himself through the mirror that was facing him. He was a gigantic insect! He couldn’t look at his own reflect. He thought that if he went to bed, he would wake up as he was before so he tried. Two hours later, he woke up. He was feeling lucky and went to the mirror with confidence. When he saw his hideous cockroach’s face with those long antennas he wanted to die. How could he have a normal and happy life looking like that? The poor thing went to a bridge and jumped from it. This is sadly how Gregor Samsa committed suicide.