85994
I am trying to read [変身 The
Metamorphosis](http://bilinguis.com/book/metamorphosis/jp/en/c1/) by Kafka. I
have troubles understanding the following :

> 虫に変ってしまっているのに気づいた

translated by

> he discovered that he had been changed into a bug

First i'm not sure how to understand 変ってしまっている. I think of it as 締まる acting as
a subsidiary verb for 変る (+ている form since being locked in a bug body is going
to last).​ Something like 変る ~ to transform VS 変ってしまっている ~ to transform and
(sadly) be locked in the resulting state.

Second i red about のに
[here](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/25211/difference-
between-%e3%81%ae%e3%81%ab-and-%e3%81%a8%e3%81%84%e3%81%86%e3%81%ae%e3%81%ab)
and [here](https://maggiesensei.com/2012/06/20/how-and-when-to-
use-%E3%81%AE%E3%81%ABnoni-request-lesson/) but i'm still not sure. Since the
"even though" and the "while" meaning don't seem to work here, is it the
"represents the speaker's feeling of discontent or regret" use of のに?

Thanks
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question
grammar meaning subsidiary-verbs
Can't understand 虫に変ってしまっているのに気づいた
Let's break this sentence down.

> 虫に変ってしまっているのに気づいた

At a basic level this sentence breaks up into two fundamental parts:

> (A) 虫に変った -- Someone/thing changed into a bug

and

> (B) 気づいた -- Someone noticed something.

What is noticed is being changed into a bug. That would make sentence **A**
the object of 気づいた. Two things need to happen here to complete this joining of
sentence **A** and **B**.

When you say "I noticed A" in Japanese, the particle that marks what you
noticed is に. So, "I noticed A" becomes

> **A** に気づいた

But in Japanese, **A** must be a noun, it can't be a sentence or a verb or
anything else. To make sentence **A** a noun we _nominalize_ it. There are
various ways of doing this, but often in a situation like this the nominalizer
used is の. This works as follows:

> **A** + の --> 虫に変ったの

(There's no nice way to translate this grammatical construction into English.)

So, now we can put **A** and **B** together.

> **A** + の + に + **B** --> 虫に変った + の + に気づいた --> 虫に変わったのに気づいた。

So notice: the のに here is not the のに you're looking for; this is a different
grammatical construct. There are two distinctly different grammatical
constructs here: nominalizing a sentence with の and singling out that which
was noticed with に.

To get a bit of a better feel for this, let's change the sentence a bit to

> Mr B saw Mr A change into a bug.

Again there are two basic underlying sentences:

> Mr A changed into a bug --> Aさんが虫に変わった。

and

> Mr B saw [it]. --> Bさんは見た。

In this case, what is seen is marked by the particle を, but still Aさんが虫に変わった
needs to be nominalized (again we'll use の). Put together we get

> Aさんが虫に変わったのをBさんは見た。

On to てしまう

In English we like short to-the-point _objective_ -sounding sentences: "He
noticed he'd changed into a bug." Perfect! But, in Japanese these sorts of
expressions come across as blunt, emotionless, and rather inhuman. In other
words, 虫に変わったのに気づいた sounds a bit like a droid; it feels like it completely
lacks any human feeling or emotion.

The てしまう construct has a wide range of meanings. On one level, it gives the
sentence a sense of completeness.

> 虫に変わってしまった --> He'd completely changed into a bug.

And, I think for a native speaker, there is at least a minimal residue of this
meaning in the sentence. But, てしまう can also express shock, regret,
disappointment. Just try to imagine your reaction upon waking up noticing that
you were no longer human but a bug. You would be in a bit of shock.

> [皿]{さら}が割れてしまった。

> The dish was broken.

Here てしまう expresses a sense of finality: the dish is broken and there's
nothing that can be done about it; it's been destroyed. And if the dish were
something that you were given by, let's say, your gramma, you might be very
sad about this. This てしまう is a very powerful and useful construct for
expressing such emotions.

But, back to Kafka. We could write:

> 虫に変わってしまったのに気づいた。

This would however leave the reader wondering, "is he a bug or not?" Perhaps
he only noticed somehow that during the night he'd been transformed into a
bug, but currently he's not a bug.

Imagine a werewolf or vampire sort of story. You might read

> 起きたとき夜[狼]{オオカミ}に変わってしまったのに気づいた。

> When he woke up, he noticed that last night he'd changed into a werewolf.

He's not a werewolf right now, but there's some kind of clear evidence that
that's what happened.

In the case with Kafka, it's not just that he changed into a bug, but he's
**still** a bug. So, to get this across, we need to say

> 虫に変わってしまっている

Perfect!

Why not instead just say

> 虫に変わってしまう

_Tense_ in Japanese doesn't work like in English. There's not really a
_present_ tense in Japanese, just a non-past form and a perfective form. I
recommend you read up these different forms else where. But, in short, the
non-past form (which we often call the present tense) indicates an incomplete
state. So,

> 虫に変わってしまう

means something more like "I will become a bug."
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