Kafka's The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) is a novella that opens with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking one morning in his Prague apartment to find himself changed into an enormous creature that the German text calls a monstrous vermin. Kafka wrote it in late 1912, and it first appeared in October 1915 in the Leipzig magazine Die weissen Blaetter, then as a small book from the publisher Kurt Wolff in November of that year.¹

Kafka was a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, who worked days as an insurance clerk and wrote at night. Gregor supports his parents and sister with a job he hates, and once he can no longer work, his family's patience and affection drain away until they are relieved when he dies. Kafka asked his publisher that the creature never be drawn on the cover, so that readers would picture it themselves. The story is told in flat, almost bureaucratic prose, and that contrast between a nightmare event and a calm style became his signature.¹²

Readers have taken the story as a parable of alienation, family guilt, illness or the cold logic of modern work, and Kafka never explained it. He died of tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40, having asked his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts. Brod refused and published The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. Today the word Kafkaesque describes any bewildering, oppressive situation, and the novella influenced writers from Borges and Camus to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who said that reading it showed him he could write the way his grandmother told stories.¹²