In The Metamorphosis it was hard to distinguish between dream and reality, as everything seemed so distant and apart. It appears as the four walls have caved in, and Gregor lies there helplessly in the matrix of confusion. Throughout The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka is uncovering potential dangers of social rejection. Essentially, this metamorphosis leads to Gregor's separation from his family and previous life. Franz Kafka expresses Gregor's transformation through numerous emotional and physical stages. The theme of alienation plays a huge role in The Metamorphosis. Alienation is the state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved. Gregor Samsa is alienated from his body, family and humanity altogether.
Gregor's removal from humanity transcends from his private dynamic into the public realm by impacting his experience and life of social interaction. Having awakened as a bug, Gregor looks about his room and recognizes it to be the same. "Above the table hung the picture which he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put into a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady, with a fur cap on and fur stole, sitting upright and holding out to the spectator a huge fur muff into which the whole of her forearm had vanished!" (319). As a means of creating a social balance in his world, the woman acts as a companion in Gregor's alienation from the public realm. The appearance of the woman in the picture has a great significance to this story. In the picture the woman is wearing some type of fur material; which figuratively represents an animal. Gregor relates to this symbolism because this family has always treated him the same way a person would treat an unwanted pet. The only one that seemed to treat him like a human being was his sister Grete. In first two weeks of his transformation, his parents would not even dare to visit him because they did not know how to handle this situation.