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I found the work we did this week exploring depression in literature very interesting.  So I would like to offer another example, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”.  I think that this piece of fiction can be understood in terms of Professor’s Grobstein’s storyteller, unconscious, and model of mental illness.  The protagonist, Gregor, is suffering mental discomfort because his story about himself is no longer functioning.  He is unable to live up to the difficult demands he imagines his family has set for him.  That his role in the family is to provide essential financial support and repay his father’s debts to his boss. 

The metamorphosis is a symbolic representation of severe depression. The strange sensations he experiences are analogous to the lack of communications or inputs the storyteller normally experiences in the course of depression.  It is his unconscious that is responsible for sensory inputs that are constructed by his storyteller as making him a bug.  His transformation into a giant bug affords him the opportunity to take a break from his responsibilities; it forces him to reflect on his life and relationships. Gregor had defined himself in terms of his relationship to his family members.  After the transformation, he makes some limited progress towards developing a self-understanding, a story of his own needs and desires.  Tragically, he is ultimately unable to work through his depression in the end.