HENRI THE CAT

So, I was just scrolling through Facebook and came across this picture. It reminds me so much of Henri the cat that the lines could've been taken directly from him. As I was thinking, you can really relate Henri to Gregor. After all they're both some sort of animal/insect and have the conscious of a human being. We usually think of animals as satisfied and happy (as long as they're treated well) because of their inability to understand anything other than their immediate lives. We even go as far to assume that insects have no souls, as we mentioned in class. I think it's a really effective method, both in literature and just for fun, to assign human consciousness to animals/insects. I think the Henri video we watched is applying an existentialist attitude to a cat just for fun. However, if we want to translate it into some kind of figurative meaning, I think that the video kind of mocks a lot of people's attitudes towards life, implying that many of our worries are trivial. In the case of Gregor, I think the author makes him an insect with a human conscious partly in order to portray how worthless he is to his family. So, my point is that people often use the animal/human conscious dynamic to convey different messages, and I thought this picture was a funny way to show the difference between dogs and cats.