Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes one morning from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a monstrous, vermin-like insect. Trapped in his bedroom, he frets about missing his train and his oppressive job while his alarmed family gathers outside the door. As the story unfolds, Gregor struggles to move his new body and to communicate, and his horrified parents and sister gradually shift from caring for him to resenting and neglecting the burden he has become, until his lonely decline reaches its quiet, inevitable end.
A cornerstone of modern literature, this novella renders the absurd with chilling matter-of-factness, never explaining the transformation it treats as ordinary. Kafka explores alienation, the dehumanizing weight of work and duty, and the fragility of family love when it is tested by sacrifice. Gregor's plight becomes a haunting parable of isolation and the longing to be seen as human, its unsettling power undiminished more than a century after it was written.
How it begins
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked. “What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table—Samsa was a travelling salesman—and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer. Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.