Tag: Metamorphosis

Boab’s God: Latent Agency in Welsh’s Kafkaesque Metamorphosis

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I just read The Granton Star Cause in Irvine Welsh’s short story collection, The Acid House, and couldn’t help but reflect it off of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.

Kafka gave us Gregor Samsa: a man who wakes up as vermin, stripped of usefulness, abandoned by family, slowly rotting in a godless universe. His tragedy is inertia; his metamorphosis grants him no agency, only deeper alienation.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

Welsh replies with Boab Coyle, a lad who is likewise cast off, rejected by his football mates, scorned by his parents, dumped by his girlfriend, and discarded by his job. Boab is surplus to every domain: civic, familial, erotic, and economic. Then he undergoes his own metamorphosis. And here Welsh swerves from Kafka.

Boab meets his “god.” But the god is nothing transcendent. It is simply Boab’s latent agency, given a mask – a projection of his bitterness and thwarted desires. God looks like him, speaks like him, and tells him to act on impulses long repressed. Where Kafka leaves Gregor to die in silence, Welsh gives Boab a grotesque theology of vengeance.

Through a Critical Theory lens, the contrast is stark:

  • Marx: Both men are surplus. Gregor is disposable labour; Boab is Thatcher’s lumpen. Alienated, both become vermin.
  • Nietzsche: Gregor has no god, only the absurd. Boab makes one in his own image, not an Ăśbermensch, but an Ăśber-fly – quite literally a Superfly – a petty deity of spite.
  • Foucault: Gregor is disciplined into passivity by the family gaze. Boab flips it: as a fly, he surveils and annoys, becoming the pest-panopticon.
  • Bataille/Kristeva: Gregor embodies the abjection of his family’s shame. Boab revels in abjection, weaponising filth as his new mode of agency.

The punchline? Boab’s new god-agency leads straight to destruction. His rage is cathartic, but impotent. The lumpen are permitted vengeance only when it consumes themselves.

So Kafka gave us the tragedy of stasis; Welsh provides us with the tragedy of spite. Both are bleak parables of alienation, but Welsh injects a theology of bad attitude: a god who licenses action only long enough to destroy the actor.

Gregor rots. Boab rages. Both end the same way.

Metamorphosis Inverted

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What if the real horror isn’t waking as a beetle, but as a man?

In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant beetle—a cockroach, a vermin, an intrusion of the inhuman into the domestic. The horror is obvious: loss of agency, social death, the grotesque made literal. It’s the nightmare of devolution, of becoming something other, something filthy.

But perhaps we’ve misunderstood the true absurdity.

Audio: NotebookLM podcast on this topic.

What if the real nightmare is the opposite? Not a man waking as an insect, but an insect waking in a human body—forced to contend with taxes, performance reviews, dinner parties, and the crushing weight of being legible to others. Imagine a beetle, content in its instinctual certainty, finding itself hurled into the howling contradiction of human subjectivity.

Suddenly, it must interpret signs, participate in rituals, conform to decorum, all while performing a pantomime of “meaning.” It’s not the exoskeleton that’s horrifying – it’s the endless internal monologue. The soul-searching. The unbearable tension of being expected to have purpose.

We call Gregor’s fate tragic because he can no longer function in a world built for humans. But isn’t that the human condition already? An endless, futile negotiation between the raw fact of existence and the stories we invent to make it bearable.

Gregor becomes insect. We were never anything but.