The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka (1915)
“A man wakes up as a giant insect. His family's horror reveals a truth about being human that no realistic story could: we are only as human as the people around us choose to see us.”
At a Glance
Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who supports his entire family, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His family — parents and sister Grete — initially attempts to cope, but as weeks pass they grow resentful, neglectful, and finally hostile. Gregor, who can still think and feel but cannot communicate, gradually loses the will to live. When he overhears his family say he must go, he obliges by dying. The family, relieved, takes a day trip and begins planning their bright future.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1915 in a German literary journal, then as a book by Kurt Wolff Verlag. Kafka lived to see it in print but not to see its significance recognized. After Brod's posthumous publication of Kafka's novels (The Trial, The Castle) in the 1920s, The Metamorphosis was retroactively recognized as the key to Kafka's entire project. It is now the most widely taught German-language literary text in the world and has given the English language an adjective: 'Kafkaesque.'
Diction Profile
Deliberately flat, precise, matter-of-fact — the language of reports and receipts applied to the impossible
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