The Metamorphosis

By Franz Kafka

1915

Novella

Kafka's most famous work opens with traveling salesman Gregor Samsa waking one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Rather than dwell on the impossibility of his condition, Gregor frets about missing the early train to work; his family, after an initial period of horrified care, slowly come to resent the burden he has become, until his sister declares that the thing in the bedroom can no longer be Gregor. The original German uses the deliberately ambiguous word *Ungeziefer* — "vermin," or animals unfit for sacrifice — and Kafka famously insisted no insect be depicted on the cover. Often read as autobiography, as a Marxist parable of alienated labour, as a meditation on depression and disability, or as a Freudian family drama.