The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915 in the German literary journal Die Weissen Blatter and then as a short book. It is a novella of about seventy printed pages, one of the longest texts Kafka published in his lifetime, and it was the only one of his stories to appear on the cover of a book during his life. Kafka worked for an insurance institute in Prague until illness forced him to retire, and the office life in the story is drawn from close observation.

The opening sentence states the transformation and never explains it, which is what makes the book a permanent argument among critics: readings have treated Gregor as a study of a family's dependency on a single worker, as a document of Kafka's relationship with his father, and as religious allegory, among other things. What is not disputed is the method. Kafka narrates from inside Gregor's point of view, so the reader is given an insect's clumsiness, an insect's appetite and a man's feelings about the sister who brings him food, in the same voice and without comment.

The rest of the family gets the second half of the book: the father who throws fruit at him, the mother who cannot look at him, and Grete, who becomes his carer and then his advocate for giving up on him. The story has been translated many times, and translators continue to disagree about how to render the phrase describing exactly what Gregor has become. It has been adapted for film, stage and graphic novels and is the entry point through which most readers meet Kafka.