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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—Flowered Wallpaper:
When Grete and Gregor's mother try to clear out Gregor's room in Section 2, they catch sight of Gregor perched on the wall in an ironic perversion of nature:
[...] caught sight of the huge brown mass on the flowered wallpaper, and before she was really conscious that what she saw was Gregor screamed in a loud, hoarse voice: “Oh God, oh God!” fell with outspread arms over the sofa as if giving up and did not move. “Gregor!” cried his sister, shaking her fist and glaring at him.
The image of Gregor perched on the "flowered wallpaper," and the ensuing horror that image evokes in Grete, is an ironic perversion of an otherwise natural scene: a bug perched on a flower. The fact that it is a human-sized bug perched on flowered wallpaper, however, distorts this otherwise natural scene.
The situation is further ironic because it results in Grete addressing Gregor directly for the first time since his metamorphosis, and yet she does so in a situation in which Gregor appears most like a bug. Gregor crawling on the side of the wall, on top of a wallpaper flower, and evoking horror in his sister and then mother is the most inhuman he has appeared at this point in the story. However, it is only now that Gregor's sister addresses him by name.
Gregor's mother is described as falling on the sofa "as if giving up." While the simile is used to describe her fainting, it specifically highlights that Gregor is losing any chance of communicating with his family as he becomes more insect-like. They are "giving up" on finding a way out of this terrible situation, a fact that becomes clear in the third section of the story. The simile also emphasizes once more the horror that is Gregor's inhuman appearance, as it provokes Gregor's mother to figuratively give up on life itself.
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