Late in the story, a large, bony, wild haired “char woman” (a stand-in for the archetypal witch, although bemused and practical rather than wicked and rapacious) addresses Gregor as “you old dung beetle.” Dung beetles live on the dung from other animals and can roll dung balls many times their own weight. Some dung beetles also eat decayed vegetation, similar to Gregor, who found that he preferred rotting food to the food he used to enjoy in his previous form. A metamorphosis (the Greek words for “change” and “form”) is one of the dung beetle’s life stages. A dung beetle may begin its life as an egg inside a dung ball. The egg hatches and the larva eats the dung for its nourishment until it emerges from the ball a fully formed adult—a singular evolution.

By the time The Metamorphosis was published in 1915, Darwin’s The Origin of Species had been in circulation for fifty-six years.

In Kafka’s tale, Gregor devolves. He is transformed during sleep, and he spends the rest of his brief life in his bedroom, a space in which one should experience nightly rejuvenation but instead offers Gregor only a terminal prison cell. It becomes a den that accretes dust and filth, its furniture irrelevant as Gregor enjoys crawling on the walls and ceilings as he can no longer lie comfortably in bed, cannot sit on his settee or at his desk. By the end of his wretched, solitary life spent working to pay off his parents’ debt (the German word Schuld means both “debt” and “guilt”), he has shrunken, and his body can be placed into a small box. A paper coffin, like a grave made of something as flimsy as words. Easily hidden, buried, burned.

Gregor was abandoned—by his employer, father, mother, sister, and ultimately one could argue, his god. Did he transcend? Did he ask for it? Did he have it coming, with his ridiculous delusions of self-importance and his complaints and his small-mindedness and his obsession with his sister’s changing states of un/dress? Did he transcend by the end of his life—with his radiant embrace of music, with his peaceful, solitary death in the light?

Abandoned and then re-en-familied, re-kinned, an adoptee is many things, including, I would posit, both a form of ongoing transit and a re-territory, a re-form. This form takes on different meanings depending on the place, the language, and the people looking, listening. If our form is different, if we are no longer recognizable, if no one speaks our language, who are we?

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How important is memory?