Literary notes about VERMIN (AI summary)
The term “vermin” has been employed in literature with remarkable versatility, functioning both as a literal reference to pestilent creatures and as a metaphor for moral, social, or existential degradation. In some works it dehumanizes characters—Dostoyevsky’s remark that “she looks on me as vermin” ([1]) and Kafka’s unsettling transformation of Gregor Samsa into a “horrible vermin” ([2]) poignantly underline this use. Other authors invoke the term to describe actual pests that wreak havoc on society and nature, as seen in descriptions of decaying interiors in Eliot’s “Middlemarch” ([3]), or in Darwin’s discussion of crop destruction ([4]). At times, “vermin” is even employed in a commanding or dismissive tone, as in Verne’s call to “rise to the surface and slaughter the vermin” ([5]), demonstrating its role as a symbol of something to be eradicated. This range—from serving as a metaphor for uncleanliness or inferiority to denoting literal infestation—reveals the layered and enduring power of the word in various literary contexts.
- She looks on me as vermin.
— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
— from Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka - There was nothing but pickled vermin, and drawers full of blue-bottles and moths, with no carpet on the floor.
— from Middlemarch by George Eliot - Thus, there seems to be little doubt that the stock of partridges, grouse, and hares on any large estate depends chiefly on the destruction of vermin.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection by Charles Darwin - "Rise to the surface and slaughter the vermin."
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne
