metamorphosis book review

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: 100 thoughts for 100 years

Kafka’s tale of a man who wakes to find he has changed into a giant insect still has the power to shock and delight a century after it was first published. Many regard it as the greatest short story in all literary fiction

1. What need a modern reader know of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung ) – arguably the most famous, also greatest, short story in the history of literary fiction?

2. Of its stature, for example, Elias Canetti wrote that the story was something Kafka “could never surpass, because there is nothing which Metamorphosis could be surpassed by”. As endorsements go, the bar could not be set higher.

3. Kafka’s place in the literary pantheon has been assured for some time, most pleasingly expressed by George Steiner ’s suggestion that he is the only author of whom it may be said that he made his own a letter of the alphabet – K.

4. Here, though, is a little novelty: in 2015, Metamorphosis is 100 years old. At least, 1915 is when the story was published, which is to say “finished”; and Kafka, famously, didn’t finish very much.

5. Kafka worked on Metamorphosis through the autumn of 1912 and completed a version on 7 December that year. But negotiations with publishers were complicated, and circumstances – the first world war, among other things – intervened.

6. Finally Metamorphosis was set before readers in October 1915, in the avant-garde monthly Die Weissen Blätter, then put between covers that December.

7. A century on, why does Metamorphosis still attract readers? One reason is that it’s a horror story of sorts. Its premise – a man awakens in the body of an insect – exerts a ghastly fascination beyond anything in even the consummate short works of Chekhov or Joyce or Alice Munro .

8. Another is that it is, amid its pathos, awfully funny. Gregor Samsa wakes to discover he has six legs and a shell, yet for some pages he thinks that what ails him might just be the kind of throat complaint that is “the occupational malady of travellers”. What can you do but laugh?

9. And there’s more. As Gregor struggles to crawl off his bed, a clerk from his company calls at the Samsa apartment. As Vladimir Nabokov commented: “This grim speed in checking a remiss employee has all the qualities of a bad dream.” But it is also farce: a personal embarrassment raised to a debacle by multiple easily shocked persons arriving on the scene to witness it.

10. Metamorphosis exemplifies the world Kafka invented on paper – recognisable but not quite real, precisely detailed and yet dreamlike.

11. We call this world “Kafkaesque”, of course, while keeping mindful of Italo Calvino ’s lament that one hears that term “every quarter of an hour, applied indiscriminately”.

12. I’ll venture we mean “Kafkaesque” to denote a sense of suddenly inhabiting a world in which one’s customary habits of thought and behaviour are confounded and made hopeless.

13. To dig a little deeper, the term evokes an individual’s sense of finding himself victimised by large impersonal forces, feeling after a while that he can’t but take it personally – and feeling haunted, too, by the sense that maybe, after all, he deserves it.

14. If you grant the preceding, then Metamorphosis is perhaps the quintessential Kafka story.

15. Given how well the story has aged, it is telling that Kafka at first didn’t wholly delight in his handiwork. Even as he inspected the proofs he was unpersuaded. (“Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow.”)

16. But the very fact that Metamorphosis was read, chuckled over and frowned on while Kafka was alive may bear repeating; for the myth rather persists that Kafka was unknown and unpublished in his lifetime.

17. Though his great fame was posthumous, he did have a reputation to speak of while he was alive. If a minor figure, he nonetheless had a better class of admirer (eg, Robert Musil ).

18. In 1915 the dramatist Carl Sternheim, winner of the prestigious Theodor Fontane prize, bestowed his prize money on Kafka as a mark of writer-to-writer respect.

19. (Can you imagine the Man Booker prizewinner of 2015 declaring from the dais that s/he plans to hand over the £50,000 to a rival novelist whose stuff s/he considers so much better?)

20. Legendarily, though, Kafka had no bigger fan than his university friend Max Brod , who decided early on that Kafka was a genius, and duly ended up saving his works from incineration.

21. Kafka’s famous literary death wish, delivered to Brod, was: “Dearest Max, my final request: Everything I leave behind in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters, from others and my own, sketches, and so forth, to be burned completely and unread … ”

22. Brod disobeyed Kafka, claiming that his friend had intimated his wish some years earlier, whereupon Brod had made it clear he would do no such thing. In other words, we may infer that Kafka was playing hard to get.

23. Kafka did, however, stipulate that a few works were to be spared: “ The Judgment , The Stoker , Metamorphosis , Penal Colony , Country Doctor , and the short story “A Hunger Artist” … since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who may want to, from keeping them.” Certainly these are stories one would call keepers.

24. Let’s look again, then, at the setup of Metamorphosis : Gregor Samsa is a travelling salesman in cloth, who works to support his family – mother, father, younger sister – and lives with them in a flat in an apartment house, though frequent business trips mean he is rarely there.

25. Why does Gregor work so hard? Five years ago his father lost a lot of money and Gregor took a job with one of the creditors. His sister Grete was too young to work, his mother too poorly with asthma, his father rather a broken man. Gregor, then, is the man of the house: his wages keep the family. As the story begins he has, for a change, slept overnight in the flat. And then he awakens.

26. Horror, humour, the trappings of the workaday, the surrealism of dreams – all are present from the first sentence, which in German goes like this: “ Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt .”

27. No English translation disputes that Gregor wakes from troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed. But into what, precisely?

28. The adjective ungeheuren means “huge”, the noun Ungeziefer some form of “creepy-crawly” but also “vermin” – obviously more suggestive of rodents than insects, yet applicable to both, the shared characteristic being pestilent, repugnant qualities.

29. “Some kind of monstrous vermin” is how it was rendered by the story’s first English translator, AL Lloyd . “A gigantic insect” was the reading of Edwin and Willa Muir. “A monstrous cockroach” is how Michael Hofmann phrased it more recently.

30. Nabokov, who taught Kafka’s work with great ardour at Cornell University, was a passionate lepidopterist and put some care into classifying Kafka’s Ungeziefer , noting its “numerous little legs”, brown colouring and convexity of belly and back.

31. In a deduction worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Nabokov also observed that the creature’s use of “strong mandibles” for the purpose of turning a key in a lock while on its hind legs “gives us the length of his body, which is about three feet”. But this is mere dressing on Nabokov’s conclusion: namely that Gregor becomes “a big beetle”.

32. Both Kafka and Brod when discussing the story spoke freely of the “bug” ( wanze ). But Kafka wished for readers to approach his creation with rather more tact. In his 1915 correspondence with Kurt Wolff he expressed alarm (“Not that, please not that!”) at the thought that the book’s cover might bear a drawing of an insect.

33. It’s not a great stretch to propose that in his concern for how Ungeziefer Gregor was perceived, Kafka was revealing an identification with his protagonist – quite a thing, when you think about it.

34. Metamorphosis is a story in which a man suffers a terrible and inexplicable misfortune, is reduced to an abject and alien state, then is made to suffer doubly by the attitude of his ostensible loved ones, who make clear they would be better off without him – a verdict that he, with a passivity that seems culpable, accepts.

35. Not for nothing did Saul Friedländer entitle his 2013 study Kafka: Poet of Shame and Guilt .

36. Neurotic misery informed Kafka’s work just as it is the making of many a writer, but in his case the degree to which the pain appears willed – that he felt it could be no other way and probably ought to be so – makes for a significant variation.

37. There’s something a little chilling in the way he could step aside from himself, perceive his own plight, then twist it with finesse into fictional shapes that had the force of parables.

38. To live the writing life, Kafka decided early on, was to be in “the service of the Devil”. He struck this Faustian pact, knowing it was not in his favour (it never is), but that it would suffice. Writing was everything, though it couldn’t be enough, and in consequence he would cut himself off from real intimacy with any other person.

39. Certainly Kafka had what we nowadays call commitment issues with women. The degree to which he was interested in them as sexual partners is the riddle of the sphinx, one we must leave to his biographers, who don’t entirely agree.

40. It’s noteworthy, then, that Metamorphosis has a kinship with other titles in that elite group saved from the flames, Kafka having composed them during an inspired period of months in 1912 when, undoubtedly, a woman was involved.

41. By day, Kafka was an insurance man specialising in workers’ injury claims. If he saw this job as a writer’s wage slavery, nonetheless he did it for years, conscientiously.

42. By 1911 he was working – unfruitfully, he felt – on a novel with an American theme entitled The Man Who Disappeared / Der Verschollene . (It became Amerika .)

43. Worse, during 1911 he was much beset by having agreed to help his father with an interest in an asbestos factory – an investment Kafka had encouraged him to make, resulting in hassles and unhappiness.

44. But in August 1912, at Brod’s place in Prague, Kafka met Felice Bauer . Felice was 24, a cousin of Brod’s brother-in-law, and visiting from Berlin where she worked as a secretary for a firm making Dictaphones. Kafka was instantly drawn to her and began to woo her with a daily torrent of letters.

45. There is, of course, an obvious distancing effect in epistolary courtship, and Kafka could be promiscuous even with those disembodied affections.

46. Hanif Kureishi has observed wryly that Kafka “became very good at maddening, denying and provoking women. He also went to enormous trouble to ensure that none of the women engaged with him was ever happy or satisfied.”

47. Kafka saw Felice as “a happy, healthy, self-confident girl”. She was perhaps cheerier than our now standard image of aKafka fan. In fact, she wasn’t madly keen on his writing. But she did seem to have an invigorating effect on his productivity.

48. During the early months of their romance he wrote The Judgment and Metamorphosis . The former was dedicated to Felice.

49. On 17 November 1912 he wrote to Felice, confiding that he had been bedridden with misery over the fitful progess of Der Verschollene when suddenly another story idea occurred to him (“and oppressed me with inmost intensity”).

50. Work soon gathered pace. On 23 November he advised Felice with a strange but typical air of tease that his new story was “a little bit dreadful”.

51. The following day, a Sunday, he read the first part of his Die Verwandlung aloud to his friends and they laughed keenly. He must have known then that he had something.

52. Though Kafka further told Felice the piece was “extremely repulsive” and “nauseating”, he professed himself “not unhappy with it”. He even assured her his creative process was a boon to their relationship – “perhaps as much as I write and free myself, purer and worthier of you I will become.”

53. Reviewing this correspondence, it seems that some part of Kafka desired to make a show of his stigmata; and not – whatever his protestations – because that effort was so very self-abnegating but, rather, because he took an artist’s pride in the distinguished originality of his wounds.

54. Kafka’s friend Franz Werfel recommended Die Verwandlung to Wolff in March 1913. Wolff recommended it in turn to Franz Blei, literary editor of Die Weissen Blätter. Musil wanted to see it for his magazine Die Neue Rundschau but that came to naught.

55. The year 1913 was nonetheless a good one for Kafka’s output: The Judgment and The Stoker (the first chapter of what had become Amerika ) were published.

56. Kafka became engaged to Felice in April 1914, but broke it off in July. The bonds of marriage appealed to him only in theory.

57. Then came the war. Kafka was spared military service as an “indispensable worker”. But his brother-in-law fought, and what he told Kafka of trench warfare possibly inspired In the Penal Colony , which got Kafka back into a productive groove. The Trial , too, was drafted largely in 1914-15.

58. From this promising point in his authorial career, did Kafka power forward? He did not. By 1916 the writing had gone adrift. He took leave from his insurance job, to no great avail. He and Felice reconciled and were engaged again in July 1917.

59. At 4am on 11 August 1917 Kafka woke abruptly and started coughing blood. On 4 September doctors diagnosed tuberculosis.

60. Kafka observed his predicament carefully and to a friend he declared it to be fate: “… it is a just blow, which, incidentally, I do not feel at all as a blow, but as something quite sweet in comparison with the average course of the past years … ”

61. The diagnosis was by no means the end of Kafka’s writing, yet from this moment until the end he carried a burden, like a hard shell on his back. Tuberculosis was a project to which he was condemned, and this confinement he experienced as being, somehow, set free.

62. In December 1917 he broke with Felice for the second and decisive time. She got over it, and married another man a year later.

63. Sickness and solitude could easily break a writer, but then Kafka didn’t write for common-coin reasons: not to delight himself, or to make a living, or impress the opposite sex.

64. Why did he write? In the famous “Letter to his Father” – gouged out of himself during a supposed vacation in the mountain village of Schelesen in November 1919, but never sent – he dedicated his entire oeuvre to the man who sired him: “My writing was about you; in it, I merely lamented what I was unable to lament at your breast.”

65. Hermann Kafka, ex-serviceman and purveyor of fancy goods, was the strapping son of a butcher. Hermann and his wife Julie conceived five further children after Franz was born in 1883, though two died young, leaving Franz as the sole boy with three sisters. Hermann did no obvious wrong to anyone, and yet literary history holds a strong image of him as the great oppressor in Franz’s life.

66. As Alan Bennett , author of the play Kafka’s Dick , notes: “Hermann Kafka has had such a consistently bad press that it’s hard not to feel a sneaking sympathy for him as for all the Parents of Art. They never get it right.”

67. Kureishi, meanwhile, has ranked the “character” of Hermann as “probably one of [Kafka’s] best literary creations or fictions”.

68. The “Letter” is a flabbergasting list of grievances regarding the many and various “orbits of influence” Franz believed Hermann to have exerted against him, and his own “struggle” to resist.

69. And yet the “Letter” is also replete with notes of trapped, thwarted regard. Franz professes to have felt himself “a miserable specimen” next to his dad – “not only in your eyes but in the eyes of the whole world, for you were for me the measure of all things”.

70. The harder recriminatory strain, though, leads to invective: “You have put it into your head to live entirely off me. And there is the combat of vermin, which not only sting but, on top of it, suck your blood in order to sustain their own life. That’s what the real professional soldier is; and that’s what you are. You are unfit for life … ”

71. With the charge of parasitical behaviour, and the wince-making evocation of “vermin”, we are carried back into the world of Metamorphosis .

72. In the story, Gregor, having gradually accepted his insect state as irreversible, then attempts to adapt the good efforts he customarily makes on behalf of his family, and – while he succumbs to a degree of self-pity – is rather ashamed of himself.

73. How do the Samsa family members adapt themselves to Gregor? The film-maker David Cronenberg , in his introduction to Susan Bernofsky’s 2012 translation , puts it eloquently: “It never occurs to them that, for example, a giant beetle has eaten Gregor; they don’t have the imagination.” Rather, in a thoroughly bourgeois manner, the Samsas see Gregor’s plight as “an unfortunate natural family occurrence with which one must reluctantly contend”.

74. A great and terrible moment comes when Gregor’s sister argues vehemently that the “monster” in Gregor’s room cannot possibly be Gregor – that its pestilent presence in the Samsa home is proof of its inhumanity. Gregor remains sufficiently human to hear those words and to feel them, and his response provides the story’s climax.

75. Some of the most distinguished writers to have written on Kafka have taken the view that Gregor is a suffering saint, and his family a collection of monsters.

76. “Gregor”, Nabokov told his students with maximum moral punch, “is a human being in an insect’s disguise; his family are insects disguised as people”.

77. In the essay on Kafka in his Illuminations , Walter Benjamin observes how “the fathers in Kafka’s strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like giant parasites”.

78. During the Marxist analysis of the “Notes on Kafka” in Prisms , Theodor Adorno comments feelingly on how often in this writer’s work “the parasitic moment is displaced. Gregor Samsa, not his father, becomes the bug”.

79. What Adorno doesn’t address is the degree to which Kafka was displacing through fiction a sense of parasitism that he saw in his own reflection, the “miserable specimen” in the mirror.

80. The dating of the never-sent “Letter to his Father” is noteworthy, too – ie not long after Kafka had conducted another of his hopeless courtships, with a dressmaker from Prague named Julie Wohryzek. Kafka proposed to her in the summer of 1919. Hermann thought the match ill-advised, half-baked, beneath his son’s station. Unsurprisingly, the marriage didn’t happen, ostensibly because the couple couldn’t find a place to live.

81. But the reason Kafka gives to Hermann is that he is “mentally incapable of marrying”, marriage being “your [Hermann’s] very own domain”. In other words, Kafka felt Hermann had already deformed him irreparably in the sexual-romantic department.

82. There were two further notable romances in Kafka’s life: a largely epistolary affair with the gifted translator Milena Jesenská-Pollak, who was unhappily married and therefore unattainable – unless, that is, both she and Kafka had been prepared to do something about it.

83. Then came Dora Diamant, 19 years old when Kafka met her at the seaside resort of Müritz in 1923. Within a few weeks the two were planning a future, contemplating a fresh start in Berlin, or Tel Aviv. In fact, the unassuming Dora became Kafka’s companion unto death.

84. Philip Roth , who taught Kafka’s works at the University of Pennsylvania (and who published The Breast in homage to Metamorphosis ) once wrote a part-essay/part-imagining called “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’, or, Looking at Kafka” – in which a pretend-Kafka survives TB and moves to settle in Newark as a Hebrew schoolteacher (where he instructs a young “Philip Roth”.) But if that was Roth’s dream, it doesn’t approximate to anything Kafka appeared to fancy for himself.

85. In a letter of July 1922, Kafka told Brod that he feared death in part because he had never lived, but that there was both an upside to that and a down: “What I have toyed with is really going to happen. I have not bought myself off by my writing. I died my whole life long and now I will really die. My life was sweeter than other people’s and my death will be all the more terrible.”

86. Kafka “toyed” with death to the extent that his great writings may be seen as a sort of highly imaginative rehearsal for the end of all things: little suicides, if you like. Metamorphosis is the most vivid – the saddest, most ghastly and unforgettable – of them all.

87. By the middle of 1924 his health was so poor he had to move back in with Hermann and Julie. He was suffering from agonising tubercular lesions, and the pain of swallowing left him ever more parched and starved. At noon on 3 June 1924, he died. He was 40.

88. The Scottish poet-translator Edwin Muir and his wife Willa gave English readers the Kafka they knew and loved for decades. Metamorphosis , though, was first rendered in English by Eugene Jolas across three issues of the journal Transitions from 1936 to 1938.

89. However, the first single-volume English translation dates from 1937 and was by AL Lloyd, the folk musicologist, singer, arranger and author.

90. Lately, through newer translations, English readers have got to know Kafka over again. It is widely felt that the Muirs were over-fussy, distorting what Stanley Corngold has called the “luminous plainness in Kafka’s prose”.

91. Great books are, of course, often translated into dramas, even though a literary masterpiece has, by definition, already found its perfect form. Steven Berkoff’s movement-centred staging of Metamorphosis allowed a succession of gifted performers to contort their bodies into the mutated shape of Gregor Samsa: first, Berkoff himself in 1969, later, Brad Davis (1982), Tim Roth (1986), Roman Polanski (1988), and, on Broadway in 1989, Mikhail Baryshnikov.

92. One might wonder how Cronenberg would adapt Metamorphosis for cinema, except that his The Fly (1986) gives a decent idea. That film’s protagonist does not wake to find himself an insect but, rather, mutates into a hybrid form over a period of weeks, during which – just as Nabokov says of Gregor – “his human impressions still mingle with his new insect instincts”.

93. Kafka composed a notable number of stories from the perspective of creatures: “Investigations of a Dog”, “A Report to an Academy”, “Josephine the Singer”, “The Burrow”. It’s as if he were saying: “You’re in the body you’re in, it makes the problems it makes, the soul cries out regardless.”

94. My First Kafka: Runaways, Rodents and Giant Bugs (2013) is a book for children in which Matthue Roth retells Metamorphosis , with drawings by Rohan Daniel Eason . It’s a fine idea, playing to the seemingly irreducible anthropomorphic bent of literature aimed at kids.

95. But that’s not to say Kafka’s original can’t work for younger readers. Last summer I had my old Penguin Kafka with me by the pool during a shared family holiday, and at one point a nine-year-old friend of my daughter picked up the book and began to question me about it. The next time I looked, the book was gone.

96. Could there ever be another Kafka? If he were living today in our age of instant publishing, neglected book mountains and 24-hour multimedia (self-)promotion, do you suppose he could get a start in the writing game?

97. One would hope so, but it’s not a business for overly retiring types, not ideal for one who reviewed his life’s work and concluded that the bulk of it ought to be consumed by fire.

98. On the one hand, it’s hard to imagine Kafka on Twitter, yet undeniably he had a gift for aphorism. “In the struggle between yourself and the world, back the world” – that’s 62 characters right there.

99. Social media could have fitted Kafka like a glove, or a skin, or a hard shell. His reticence and enigma might have made him, counterintuitively, a deeply marketable author.

100. Can we imagine, then, in 2015, that the greatest fabulist of our times might be a resolutely single if not “undateable” solitary, glumly tied to the parental home, trapped doing unglamorous office work, and tapping away after dark at literary efforts that he cannot ever quite complete or sign off? It doesn’t seem quite plausible, or desirable, perhaps. But that, more or less, is the story of Kafka, and why we are able to treasure what is indeed the most famous, also greatest, short story in the history of literary fiction.

• Franz Kafka
• Short stories
• Walter Benjamin

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Metamorphosis’ is a short story (sometimes classed as a novella) by the Czech-born German-language author Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It is his best-known shorter work, published in German in 1915, with the first English translation appearing in 1933. ‘The Metamorphosis’ has attracted numerous interpretations, so it might be worth probing this fascinating story more closely.

You can read ‘The Metamorphosis’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Kafka’s story below.

Plot Summary

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. Although he briefly considers this transformation, he quickly turns his thoughts to his work and his need to provide for his parents (he lives with them and his sister) so that they can pay off their debts. He also thinks about how much he hates travelling.

He realises he is already late for work, but hesitates to call in sick because he has never had a day off sick before, and knows this might raise alarm bells. When he responds through the bedroom door after his mother calls to him, he realises that his voice has become different as a result of his metamorphosis into an insect. When his family try to enter his bedroom, they find the door locked, and he refuses to let them in.

Then there’s a knock at the door and it’s the chief clerk for whom Gregor works, wondering where Gregor has got to.

Still Gregor refuses to open the door to his family or to his visitor. The chief clerk is affronted and tells Gregor through the door that his work has not been good enough and his position at the company may not be safe. Gregor seeks to defend himself, and assures the clerk that he will soon return to work. However, because Gregor’s voice has changed so much since his transformation, nobody can understand what he’s saying.

Gregor opens the door and his mother screams when she sees him. He asks the chief clerk to smooth things over at the office for him, explaining his … sudden metamorphosis into an insect.

Later that evening, having swooned and dozed all day, Gregor wakes up at twilight and finds that his sister had brought him milk with some bread in it. Gregor attempts to drink the milk, but finds the taste disgusting, so he leaves it. He climbs under the couch so his family don’t have to look at him, while his sister tries to find him food that he can eat.

Gregor overhears his family talking in the other room, and discovers that, despite their apparent debts, his parents have some money stashed away. He has been going to work to support them when he didn’t have to.

As well as the changes to his voice, Gregor also realises that his vision has got worse since his transformation. He also discovers that he enjoys climbing the walls and the ceiling of his bedroom. To help him, his sister gets rid of the furniture to create more space for him to climb; Gregor’s mother disagrees and is reluctant to throw out all of Gregor’s human possessions, because she still trusts that he will return to his former state one day.

When he comes out of the room, his mother faints and his sister locks him outside. His father arrives and throws apples at him, severely injuring him, because he believes Gregor must have attacked his own mother.

After his brush with death, the family change tack and vow to be more sympathetic towards Gregor, agreeing to leave the door open so he can watch them from outside the room as they talk together. But when three lodgers move in with the family, and his room is used to store all of the family’s furniture and junk, he finds that he cannot move around any more and goes off his food. He becomes shut off from his family and the lodgers.

When he hears his sister playing the violin for the lodgers, he opens the door to listen, and the lodgers, upon spotting this giant insect, are repulsed and declare they are going to move out immediately and will not pay the family any of their rent owed. Gregor’s sister tells her parents that they must get rid of their brother since, whilst they have tried to take care of him, he has become a liability. She switches from talking about him as her brother and as an ‘it’, a foreign creature that is unrecognisable as the brother they knew.

Gregor, overhearing this conversation, wants to do the right thing for his family, so he decides that he must do the honourable thing and disappear. He crawls off back to his room and dies.

Gregor’s family is relieved that he has died, and the body is disposed of. Mr Samsa kicks the lodgers out of the apartment. He, his wife, and their daughter are all happy with the jobs they have taken, and Mr and Mrs Samsa realise that their daughter is now of an age to marry.

The one thing people know about ‘The Metamorphosis’ is that it begins with Gregor Samsa waking up to find himself transformed into an insect. Many English translations use the word in the book’s famous opening line (and we follow convention by using the even more specific word ‘beetle’ in our summary of the story above).

But the German word Ungeziefer does not lend itself easily to translation. It roughly denotes any unclean being or creature, and ‘bug’ is a more accurate rendering of the original into English – though even ‘bug’ doesn’t quite do it, since (in English anyway) it still suggests an insect, or at least some sort of creepy-crawly.

For this reason, some translators (such as David Wyllie in the one we have linked to above) reach for the word vermin , which is probably closer to the German original. Kafka did use the word Insekt in his correspondence discussing the book, but ordered that the creature must not be explicitly illustrated as such at any cost. The point is that we are not supposed to know the precise thing into which Gregor has metamorphosed.

The vagueness is part of the effect: Gregor Samsa is any and every unworthy or downtrodden creature, shunned by those closest to him. Much as those who wish to denigrate a particular group of people – immigrants, foreigners, a socio-economic underclass – often reach for words like ‘cockroaches’ or ‘vermin’, so Gregor’s transformation physically enacts and literalizes such emotive propaganda.

But of course, the supernatural or even surreal (though we should reject the term ‘Surrealist’) setup for the story also means that ‘The Metamorphosis’ is less a straightforward allegory (where X = Y) than it is a more rich and ambiguous exploration of the treatment of ‘the other’ (where X might = Y, Z, or even A, B, or C).

Gregor’s subsequent treatment at the hands of his family, his family’s lodgers, and their servants may well strike a chord with not just ethnic minorities living in some communities but also disabled people, people with different cultural or religious beliefs from ‘the mainstream’, struggling artists whose development is hindered by crass bourgeois capitalism and utilitarianism, and many other marginalised individuals.

This is one reason why ‘The Metamorphosis’ has become so widely discussed, analysed, and studied: its meaning is not straightforward, its fantastical scenario posing many questions.  What did Kafka mean by such a story? Is it a comedy, a tragedy, or both? Gregor’s social isolation from his nearest and dearest, and subsequent death (a death of despair, one suspects, as much as it is a noble sacrifice for the sake of his family), all suggest the story’s tragic undercurrents, and yet the way Kafka establishes Gregor’s transformation raises some intriguing questions.

Take that opening paragraph. The opening sentence – as with the very first sentence of Kafka’s novel, The Trial – is well-known, but what follows this arresting first statement is just as remarkable. For no sooner has Gregor discovered that he has been transformed, inexplicably, into a giant insect (or ‘vermin’), than his thoughts have turned from this incredible revelation to more day-to-day worries about his job and his travelling.

This is a trademark feature of Kafka’s writing, and one of the things the wide-ranging term ‘Kafkaesque’ should accommodate: the nightmarish and the everyday rubbing shoulders together. Indeed, the everyday already is a nightmare, and Samsa’s metamorphosis into an alien creature is just the latest in a long line of modernity’s hellish developments.

So the effect of this opening paragraph is to play down, as soon as it has been introduced, the shocking revelation that a man has been turned into a beetle (or similar creature).

Many subsequent details in Kafka’s story are similarly downplayed, or treated in a calm and ordinary way as if a man becoming a six-feet-tall insect is the most normal occurrence in the world, and this is part of the comedy of Kafka’s novella: an aspect of his work which many readers miss, partly because the comedic is so often the first thing lost in translation.

And, running contrariwise to the interpretation of ‘The Metamorphosis’ that sees it as ‘just’ a straightforward story about modern-day alienation and mistreatment of ‘the other’ is the plot itself, which sees Gregor Samsa freed from his life of servitude and duty, undertaking a job he doesn’t enjoy in order to support a family that, it turns out, are perfectly capable of supporting themselves (first by the father’s money which has been set aside, and then from the family’s jobs which the mother, father, and daughter all take, and discover they actually rather enjoy).

Even Gregor’s climbing of the walls and ceiling in his room, when he would have been travelling around doing his job, represents a liberation of sorts, even though he has physically become confined to one room. Perhaps, the grim humour of Kafka’s story appears to suggest, modernity is so hellish that such a transformation – even though it ends in death – is really the only liberation modern man can achieve.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Type your email…

Continue reading

Mind About Matters

A page dedicated to discussing things that can have a massive impact on our lives

Metamorphosis – A man’s struggle with existence and survival

A book that took only three weeks to write, yet another three years to publish, Metamorphosis remains – by popular opinion – one of Franz Kafka’s best works. One that is truly emblematic of the author. And a book that almost defines the term, Kafkaesque. A fascinating, albeit sad story of one man’s struggle through what are the transformative days of his life. In the literal sense. And a transformation that isn’t pleasant by any stretch of the imagination.

First a word on the Kafkaesque Franz Kafka

Born in Prague, Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures of 20 th century literature. A novelist and short-story writer, his work largely revolves around existentialism, self-discovery, and social detachment, with plots that border on, and sometimes even crossing, the bizarre. If some critics are to be believed, many of his stories are reflections of different phases of Kafka’s own life. Which, if the plot and struggle in Metamorphosis is anything to go by, hints at quite a life.

A lawyer by formal profession meant his writing was largely limited only to his spare time. Yet, the impact of his contribution to literature is so substantial that the word ‘Kafkaesque’ is today used to describe the kind of situations you would find in his writings.

A reluctance to publish his works not only resulted in Metamorphosis being published three years after Kafka was finished, but also that some of his work, like The Trial, The Castle, and America would have to be published by his friend Max Brod. Against the instructions Kafka left back in his will I might add. But despite the limited number, his ideas have for decades influenced writers, artists, as well as philosophers.  

Metamorphosis – The twisted plot that never quite straightens out

Metamorphosis is a story of Gregor Samsa, a salesman, and sole earning winner in his family. While he, like the rest of his family deals a rather challenging financial situation, they soon find themselves dealing with a situation that is not just difficult, but so bizarre that it will take all their mental, emotional, and psychological strength to simply come to terms with it. The mysterious transformation of Gregor Samsa into…a bug. Yes, a bug. And once Gregor is sure this transformation isn’t just his dream or imagination, begins the story where one man’s existence has suddenly turned on its head. And with it, comes the suffering, emotions, and the gradual, yet understandable transformation of his family. 

As Gregor’s family, that includes his parents and sister, begins to accept his new reality, they also need to deal with the added financial responsibility caused by Gregor’s metamorphosis and subsequent incapacity. Forcing each of them to undergo a transformation, or metamorphosis, of their own. But unlike Gregor’s theirs is not a metamorphosis of the body. But of their mind, and their soul…

The Journey. And the Struggle.

Metamorphosis is not a story of inspiration. Or one with a happy ending for that matter. It is a story of cruelty, resentment, and abandonment. And while it is obviously fictional, you can’t help but experience the story’s emotions in reality. Perhaps because, even through a wildly fictional story, this book plays around the true social and psychological nature of human beings. Around the gradual change and transformation we experience. In ourselves. In the world around us. And what it means to each of us. More importantly, what it does to us, to our very nature and conduct. It’s something we have all experienced. And a realization of the extent to which it can drive an individual or a group of individuals.

Unlike most pieces of fiction, Metamorphosis does not promise a happy tale ending for its protagonist, Gregor Samsa. It is in fact one of those rare pieces where the protagonist is nothing more than allegory. Perhaps that is one of the aspects that make Metamorphosis’ story so interesting, sad, and moving at the same time.

Written by Franz Kafka. Inspired by Franz Kafka

Many argue that Kafka’s own life partly inspired the story of Metamorphosis – minus the transformation into a giant bug of course. A life that included a strained relationship with his father. A life where he was engaged to multiple women, but never married. But more importantly, a life of struggles of a middle-class working man. In a way, a life that had its fare share of resentment, abandonment, and the struggles of restraint and condemnation. The themes that are central to Metamorphosis.  

What troubles me about Metamorphosis.

Although Metamorphosis is pretty easy to follow, it can be a bit of a challenge to begin. That’s largely down to the shock that comes with Gregor Samsa’s transformation. But that is perhaps what you can expect from Kafka. And despite its spectacular narrative, a few questions about Metamorphosis do trouble me.

• No explanation about Gregor’s transformation Perhaps it is an obsession of knowing why that makes raises this question. But a lack of explanation about Samsa’s transformation to a giant bug leaves a lot to your interpretation. While this leaves the door open for many theories and possibilities, it also raises the question of how and why Samsa underwent a metamorphosis.
• Grete – Gregor Samsa’s sister A tad more difficult to explain without giving away any spoilers. But here goes. For someone who cared so much her brother, who was now a bug, Grete’s own transformation seemed a little too abrupt. Almost out of place, and out of character. Even though it is something one can understand in the larger scheme of things, the sudden transformation doesn’t do a lot of justice to what looked the one of the more likeable characters in the story.
• An empty feeling The end of Metamorphosis’ story gives you an almost empty feeling. There’s no easy way to explain this. May be even forcing some of its readers to ask, ‘What was the point of it all?’

Then again, the very aspects of Metamorphosis that trouble me may be the point of the story. May be there was no reason for Gregor Samsa’s transformation. Not every change needs a reason. May be Grete’s sudden change shows how quickly and drastically things can change. Especially in extreme situations. May be the empty feeling this book can give – like it did for me – isn’t really an empty feeling at all. But a feeling of reluctance to let go and move on. May be some things are best when they defy understanding.

I cannot make you, or anyo ne else understand. what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself. Franz Kafka Metamorphosis

The Last word

Even though Metamorphosis is a short book that can easily be completed in a day or two, it is brimming with riddling metaphors and parallels that you most likely will relate to.

Originally written in German before it was translated, and indeed interpreted in multiple languages across the world, Metamorphosis is considered to be one of Franz Kafka’s best-known works. And even though it is quite possible that its translation may have cost the book some of its original wit and literary elements, it still makes for quite an interesting read, with a plot, characters, their nature and behavior, all open to your own personal interpretation. Just as I have expressed mine. And in my judgment, it’s one of those books that most readers would either really enjoy – which I hope you do, or entirely detest.  

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)

Ronak Shetty

• What is Mind About Matters
• Book Reviews
• Advertising

Latest : 12 Rules for Life – Discipline(s) in a World of Anarchy

Latest : reliving munich: a tribute to the busby babes, latest : midnight mass – a sermon on faith and fanaticism turning into a nightmare, related posts, 12 rules for life – discipline(s) in a world of anarchy, crime and punishment – a precursor to friedrich nietzsche’s superior man, the art of war – ancient competitive tactics for the modern age, when we cease to understand the world – discovery and delusion, siddhartha – a journey to inspire countless more, the million dollar dream that feeds a billion dollar industry.

Today's Paper | April 03, 2024

The metamorphosis: a book review.

But the story of The Metamorphosis is much more than a somewhat dark, disturbing tale of a man who turns into a pitiful bug. It is a symbolic tale of a young man, the breadwinner of his family, who is unexpectedly afflicted by a disease (his turning into a bug), the subsequent reactions of his family (grief, resignation, endurance, repugnance and then explicit detestation) and his eventual death which brings a sense of ‘tranquility’ to Gregor’s family. It is a tale of an individual afflicted by a disease that he has no control over and neither does he have any idea of how it has and will continue to influence his and his family’s lives.

At first reading, it might seem that Gregor Samsa and his metamorphosis is probably a metaphor for an illness like cancer but actually, when you take into account the family’s aversion to his condition and the change in his appearance, it seems that Kafka has actually used it as a metaphor for illnesses such as AIDS. However, I found it easier to understand the novella’s symbolism without categorising it into a particular illness or disease. The more humane side of the issue, namely the reactions of Gregor’s manager, his parents, sister, their servants, and then their three lodgers is actually easier to understand and relate to for an average reader.

Nevertheless, the humane side of Kafka’s novella remains somewhat limited because of the absurd nature of the events in the book. Gregor turns into a huge bug for no clear reason at all. Kafka never talks about a punishment of any sort or whether Gregor had been a ‘bad boy’ before that fateful morning when he had turned into a bug. All characters in the book, including Gregor react to his metamorphosis in a rather illogical manner. The characters neither question why Gregor has changed physically, nor do they express any astonishment at the sight of Gregor’s new body – there is mainly fear at that point and maybe disappointment. Gregor’s office manager and Mr Samsa (Gregor’s father) are probably the only ones who express fear and maybe some shock but his mother simply faints, which by no means suggests that she was shocked because there is no hint of shock in her behaviour when she wakes up. Grete, Gregor’s sister, deals with the issue in a rather resigned manner. Their servant-girl implores her employers to let her go.

Gregor’s metamorphosis produces a curious effect in him, which may or may not be considered as symbolic as it depends on the individual’s interpretation. The process of metamorphosis completely breaks all connections between Gregor’s mind and his body. While his body is that of an insect, with all the bodily processes and requirements that a body of an insect would have, his mind remains that of a human with the same coherence in the thought processes that the reader sees throughout the book. One could take this further and speculate about how Kafka’s novella represents the disconnection of our minds and bodies in the modern times, about how this disconnection is actually how we all live today with our minds almost a separate entity in themselves while our bodies move differently and how each have different requirements. Of course, this can always be countered and criticised. Such is the nature of literature.

Despite all the absurdities in The Metamorphosis , the novella remains one of Kafka’s most well-known works. The combination of the absurd and symbolic is actually what makes the novella so complex and an interesting read. However, it is not everyone’s favourite, and that again can be explained by the same. Not everyone likes to read books like The Metamorphosis . Nevertheless, it is still worth a read. You never know when you might begin to enjoy a strange book.

View Dawn.com’s weekly book review archive here.

ڈان انویسٹی گیشن: بحریہ ٹاؤن کراچی کی مسلسل غیرقانونی توسیع کی مشکوک کہانی

سکندر اعظم نے کس بادشاہ کی موت پر کہا کہ ایک بادشاہ کو اس طرح نہیں مرنا چاہیے؟

‘زخم اور ہڈی ٹوٹی ہوتی تو بریانی کیسے بناتا؟’، انور مقصود کی افواہوں کی تردید

Has Toshakana Case Failed To Withstand The Judicial Scrutiny?

Israel Massacres World Central Kitchen Workers

Arthur Balfour Was A Raging Anti-semite: Zachary Foster

Why Has Pakistan Historically Kept PKR Overvalued?

Internet Blocks Threaten Pakistan’s Creator Economy

Week’s Must-Know Headlines: Another State Dept Official Resigns Over Govt’s Stance On Gaza Conflict

How Is World Reacting To ICJ Order On Gaza Aid?

Market Wrap Up: KSE-100 Index Closes At 67,005.10 Points

Latest stories.

FIR registered as all 8 IHC judges receive threatening letters laced with ‘white powder’

Daytime fire kills 29 people at Istanbul nightclub

US anti-Muslim incidents hit record high in 2023 over Israel-Gaza crisis

India rejects China’s renaming of 30 places in Himalayan border state

Egypt’s Sisi begins third term pledging more investment, social spending

Pakistan canvasses interest in purchase of stake in PIA

‘Dead Nazi’ to ‘Sons of Amalek’: How Israel is weaponising music to dehumanise Palestinians

Filmmaker Mahera Omar’s documentary wins award at Nepal film festival

Trying out four very different iftar menus in Islamabad

Most popular.

PCB chief meets cricket team in Kakul amid reported furore over remarks by Shaheen

Despite flak, Nawaz chairs another government meeting

Chaos in NA as opposition stopped from debating letter

IHC suspends Imran, Bushra Bibi’s sentences in Toshakhana case

Israel ‘flattens’ Iranian embassy in Damascus

Erdogan concedes defeat in Turkiye local polls

Cartoon: 2 April, 2024

IHC judges’ letter: Jillani recuses himself from inquiry commission as SC takes suo motu notice

‘PTI-SIC’ moves SC against denial of reserved seats

180 days of protest: Why are the Pakhtuns in Chaman encamped on the Pak-Afghan border?

Editorial: Jillani’s recusal strengthens the argument that judiciary must address letter issue internally

Arrest of two serving CMs on election eve has revitalised a foundering campaign to dislodge Modi

While pressure may ease on some in judiciary for a bit, little will change for others

Is there now a winning team?

The IHC six

Autism and SDGs

Pro-poor reform

Fighting monopolisation

Letter inquiry

Expanding the net, katcha badlands.

Government support?

Biden’s letter, family sins, cost of losing connectivity.

The Metamorphosis

By franz kafka.

'The Metamorphosis' was published in 1915 when Franz Kafka was only thirty-four years old. It is now considered to be his masterpiece and one of the most important examples of Existentialist literature.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a disturbing and thrilling book that leaves a reader with more questions than answers. It follows Gregor Samsa , a traveling salesman who wakes up one day to discover that he’s been transformed into a giant insect. Unfortunately, things only get worse from there and the last days of his life are filled with guilt, suffering, and fear. 

Key Facts about The Metamorphosis

• Title:   The Metamorphosis 
• When/where written : In three weeks in 1912 in Prague, Czechoslovakia
• Published: 1915
• Literary Period: World War I
• Genre:  Modernism
• Point-of-View: Third-person limited with exceptions
• Setting:  Somewhere in Europe, in an apartment, mostly Gregor’s room
• Climax:  When Gregor leaves his room during Grete’s concert
• Antagonist:  The transformation that Gregor undergoes and his family members who turn against him

Franz Kafka and  The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka’s political beliefs were defined by the time period he grew up in. During his youth, the First World War broke out after Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914. Despite this, he did not fight in the war. First, because his job was deemed essential and later because he contracted TB. He published  The Metamorphosis  when he was thirty-two years old . It had been written several years earlier over a brief period of three weeks. Kafka died ten years later after contracted tuberculosis. Today, little of Kafka’s full oeuvre remains. He burnt up to 90% of everything he published, even leaving a note for his friend to burn his remaining works (which included  The Trial  and  The Castle ) after he died.

Books Related to  The Metamorphosis

When you think of  The Metamorphosis  it is likely that the first thing that comes to mind is the absurdity of Gregor’s situation. He wakes up one morning that is like every other morning, except for the fact that he’s been transformed into a giant bug , usually depicted as a cockroach. Kafka’s use of Gregor’s situation embodies many of the fundamental elements of Existentialism. This is a philosophical and artistic movement that was at its peak in the late 1900s. It was based on the idea that human beings are responsible for creating the meaning of their life . There is no meaning in the world except for that which we create. Works of this period are usually filled with the same confusion and strangeness that readers have come to love in The Metamorphosis. Other important books of this movement include Kafka’s  The Trial,  which follows the arrest of an innocent and confused man who never finds out what crime he’s committed. Readers will also find similar witing in  THe Stranger  by Albert Camus,  On Being and Nothingness  by Jean-Paul Sarte,  Either/Or  by Søren Kierkegaard, and  Thus Spoke Zarathustra  by Friedrich Nietzsche.

The Lasting Impact of  The Metamorphosis

It was not until after his death that Kafka’s name became associated with some of the best absurdist and existentialist literature ever written. After its publication, the book was banned in Nazi Germany as well in the Soviet Union. For a period of time, after the Prague Spring, the book was banned in Czechoslovakia as well. The book resonates with readers today because of the way that Kafka was able to tap into the human condition, including emotions of fear, desperation, and guilt, while also critiquing the capitalist system and interpersonal relationships. Kafka asks the reader to consider the meaning of life and if there even is one. He brings in the elements of Existentialism to explore Gregor’s attempts to adjust to his new life. Most heartwrenching of all is Gregor’s desire, a deeply human one, to continue caring for his family even after he has become entirely incapable of doing so and has been shunned and abused by them. One of the most common questions that are asked about  The Metamorphosis  is why did this happen to Gregor? (Not to mention how). The answer lies at the heart of Existentialism, there is no reason. Life happens without rhyme or reason. In Kafka’s world view , there did not need to be a definable reason that Gregor was transformed. The fact of the transformation was enough.

The Metamorphosis Quotes 💬

Franz Kafka’s best-known work, ‘The Metamorphosis’, is driven by the trials of Gregor Samsa.

The Metamorphosis Review ⭐

Written in three weeks in the later months of 1912, and published three years later in 1915, The Metamorphosis is Franz Kafka’s most famous work.

The Metamorphosis Summary 🪳

Published in 1915, Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’ is the writer’s best-known and more widely loved work.

The Metamorphosis Historical Context 🪳

‘The Metamorphosis’ is considered to be one of Franz Kafka’s best-known works. It was first published in 1915 in Austria-Hungary, in what is today the Czech Republic.

The Metamorphosis Themes and Analysis 🪳

‘The Metamorphosis’ is a masterpiece on hitting important themes, such as transformation, alienation, and responsibility.

The Metamorphosis Character List 🪳

From Grete to the lodgers, the few characters included by Franz Kafka in ‘The Metamorphosis’ are judged by the reader based on their treatment of and reaction to Gregor after his transformation.

It'll change your perspective on books forever.

Discover 5 Secrets to the Greatest Literature

There was a problem reporting this post.

Block Member?

Please confirm you want to block this member.

You will no longer be able to:

• See blocked member's posts
• Mention this member in posts
• Invite this member to groups

Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.

Build a website. Sell your stuff. Write a blog. And so much more.

Start your website

Frappes and Fiction

Books & Philosophy

Book Review: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis is a very weird little book which is just one long extended metaphor. And I’m going to go ahead and interpret the hell out of it now because we all know I am very very knowledgeable about Literature.

The Metamorphosis  is a very weird little book which is just one long extended metaphor. And I’m going to go ahead and interpret the hell out of it now because we all know I am very very knowledgeable about Literature.

About the Book

Title:  The Metamorphosis

Author: Franz Kafka

Published: 1915

Series: (standalone)

Genre: classics, philosophy, fiction

My Rating: 4/5 stars

The Premise

Synopsis (from Goodreads) (truncated):

“With it’s startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece,  The Metamorphosis . It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation,  The Metamorphosis  has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”

Yeah, it’s one of *those* classics blurbs.

My Thoughts

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. “

That’s right. The dude randomly turns into a giant gross bug, and the rest of the story is about the fallout.

He wakes up as a bug, so clearly, he can’t go to work. His family opens the door and finds him in his new state and freaks out. He gradually loses his speech, and his sight… he ends up locked in his room crawling around on the walls and scaring everyone.

And piggybacking off some other reviews I have seen, I think this book is about anxiety and social isolation.

Gregor’s transformation into a hideous insect is representative of his self-hatred and his embarrassment of existing. His subsequent inability to provide for his family, and the impossibility of communication represents the feelings of inadequacy and social inhibition. The rejection and misunderstanding he faces with other people in his new state represents feelings of incongruity with the world and inability to connect with others regardless of how much he tries. The way he then slowly rots away in his room and gets worse and worse is about how tempting yet damaging it is to withdraw from everyone and exist without contact with the outside world.

And the ending represents what happens when you lose your place in the world and the ability to express yourself to others. When you are dead to society.

So that’s my interpretation of this book. Perhaps it’s very wrong. But it’s mine!

The Verdict

I liked this book surprisingly more than I was expecting, and I would recommend it if you want to read a short albeit quite weird classic novel!

Have you read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka? If so, what did you think of it? Feel free to leave a comment!

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to Frappes & Fiction. I post about the books I read (even if they’re not fiction), the books I think YOU should read, and anything else on my mind.

Type your email…

( I’m also on social media!)

Share this:

8 comments on “book review: the metamorphosis by franz kafka”.

I read this ages ago so I don’t quite remember the plot but think you can also read it through a biographical lens. I recall that there are many parallels between Gregor and Kafka himself (e.g. relationship to parents). But of course there are million other possible interpretations 🙂

Like Liked by 1 person

That’s interesting!

This is one I read for a class years and years ago. I enjoyed it but found the class and the teacher’s analysis of it ridiculous. I find existentialism to be rather silly so I think the book should be enjoyed on its own terms without the cheap philosophy many want to ascribe to it. I think your take on it is far better.

Like Liked by 2 people

that’s funny bc I actually find existentialism to be somewhat compelling but it wasn’t the lens I really read it through

Reading Kafka is always great. Right when you’re most disturbed, you burst out laughing, and then you’re disturbed by your own laughter. The meaning seems to ripple out. First, the individual psyche — the “self-hatred and his embarrassment of existing” you mention, surely a reflection of Kafka’s own personality. Then broader, to Auden’s point, about this psychological dysfunction being the signature dysfunction of the modern era. Then even broader to anxiety and abjection as Kierkegaard sees it, as the essential marker of human identity and perhaps of existence itself. We could read the three layers as Freudian (psychoanalytic), Marxist (historical conditions), and existentialist (condition of existence). But running through all the layers is that unique style and vision Kafka brings to the page. (Hope I’m not talking too much, Emily. Stumbled upon your blog and loving it 🙂 Gary)

I definitely agree that Kafka was probably writing from his own experience in this one– I’m pretty sure that it’s believed he had social anxiety. I do as well, so I related to the whole ethos of this book for that main reason

However you manage your social anxiety, don’t go the giant insect route!

Leave a comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, a Book Review

Introduction: the metamorphosis by franz kafka.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a novella first published in 1915. Kafka wrote the novella over the course of three weeks and won the prestigious Theodor Fontane Prize, a German-language literary award for his efforts. This was a seminal piece of work for the author.

What is The Metamorphosis  by Franz Kafka About?

After a troubled night of dreams, and no doubt a lot of tossing and turning, traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa wakes to the sound of rain hitting the window pane, only to discover that at some time during the night he was transformed into a large vermin. He is quite calm about his new body and spends some time in his bed reflecting on his life – rushing from train-to-train to customers, but not seeing them often enough to build deep relationships, waking at 4:00 am to be in the office before 7:00 am.

Have you read? 

Canada Reads, Could You Defend a Book You Loved? Global Reading Challenge: Virtual Literary Tour Book Summaries: Around the World in 120 Days, Week Four, Day Two

After he is finished reflecting on his life, Gregor has a difficult time getting off his bed because of his awkward shape, his many legs seem to have a mind of their own. While facing this dilemma, the chief clerk from Gregory’s office has come to his home to ascertain his absence. Now, Gregor has never been late or absent in all his 15 years working for the company. Because of this, his parents who had knocked on his door earlier, believe that he is ill.

The chief clerk is talking to Gregor through the door and he is using subtle threats and commenting on his work although no one has every complained about the quality of his work before. The salesman tries to defend his work, but the sound is very “unhumanlike” as it should be, because he is now an insect. Those on the other side of the door are alarmed by the sound, and that’s when he realizes that he doesn’t recognize the true sound of his voice.

The father sends for a doctor and a locksmith. Using his mouth, and harming himself in the process, Gregor Samsa finally opens the door, and you can imagine the look on everyone’s face when they see him. The trembling chief clerk moves slowly toward the door, the mother is on the floor disappearing into herself, and the father weeps. Gregor realizes that he cannot allow the chief clerk to leave now because he knows he will lose his job for sure – he has to calm him down and win him over.

His father snaps out of the state he is in and forces Gregor back into his room. His sister Grete is the only one who shows some compassion during the ordeal and brings him food, and eventually she changes toward him. As time goes they are forced to change their lifestyle. Five years before, Gregor’s father lost his business and he steps up and works very hard and is quickly promoted from a junior salesman to a traveling representative. He earns a lot of money in his new role and takes care of his family. At first, they are very grateful, then they take things for granted. Although it’s not explicit, there is a strained relationship between Gregor and his father, and that could be indicative of the relationship between Kafka and his own father.

Shortly after Gregor’s transformation, the father is forced to take a job at the bank to bring employees their breakfast. The mother sews fancy underwear and washes strangers’ clothes, and Grete attends school and learns shorthand and French. The family also rents rooms to three gentlemen who are very demanding. They have to work very hard to satisfy these men.

Later that evening, Grete tells her parents that they should get rid of the monster, that Gregor isn’t coming back and that she is tired of living like that, and the father agrees with her. Gregor wants to grant them the wish but doesn’t know how to leave. During the night, he shrivels and dies. Gregor dies so as he lived, always putting his family first. It is never explained why he was transformed in the first place.

The charwoman finds Gregor and tells the family. They mourn him, decide to take the day off, and go out together. They take the time to ask each other about their work, which they hadn’t done in a long time, they even discuss their finances, and decide to move to a better apartment. Through Gregor’s death, his family are able to live.

I detest people who behave like the Samsa family, because after Gregor is transformed and is no longer able to help himself or them, they do not really stand beside him – they are ashamed. He is an embarrassment and interrupts their lives. No one, including Gregor tries to find a cure for what ails him, is that important?

Communication is so important in a family, and people need to talk things through. Gregory was wrong to take on the burden of the family without them sitting down and talking about their financial situation when the father lost his business. He thought it was expected of him to assume his parent’s huge debt, when all along the father hadn’t lost everything and was frugal enough to save some of the money that Gregor gave to the family. Yet at no time did it occur to the father that he could use some of this extra money to apply to his debt.

Final Thoughts: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Further Reading

Vladimir Nabokov Makes Editorial Tweaks to Franz Kafka’s Novella The Metamorphosis

About the Author  Avil Beckford

Hello there! I am Avil Beckford, the founder of The Invisible Mentor. I am also a published author, writer, expert interviewer host of The One Problem Podcast and MoreReads Success Blueprint, a movement to help participants learn in-demand skills for future jobs. Sign-up for MoreReads: Blueprint to Change the World today! In the meantime, Please support me by buying my e-books Visit My Shop , and thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn , Facebook , Twitter and Pinterest !

Enjoyed this article?

Find more great content here:

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, Book Summary

Our iceberg is melting by john p. kotter and holger rathgeber, summary, the three questions by leo tolstoy – retold by jon j muth.

Travelling Through Words

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka – Book Review

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is a book of despair and helplessness. Just imagine – you wake up one day and you have become a vermin. What do you do now? This may be a metaphor for the unexpected tragedies life throws at us. Not only us, but our families are left confused as to what they can do, much like Gregor’s family who had to deal with what their son had become as well as manage financially without his contribution. 

“for the time being he must remain calm, he must show patience and the greatest consideration so that his family could bear the unpleasantness that he, in his present condition, was forced to impose on them.”

I loved the writing and I can’t wait to read Kafka’s longer books. It was simple, but gripping and I especially enjoyed his frequent use of em dashes. 

This is a book of despair about a family that is struck with a very strange tragedy. Gregor is helpless in his condition and his family struggles to live with their son who is forever changed. This book has a lot of pain and misery, but it also shows love and care for one’s loved ones. Reading it was an interesting experience. I didn’t fully understand the larger meaning of this strange story but I did understand the emotions it seeked to evoke about the human condition, life, death, and relationships. 

I am really looking forward to reading Kafka’s other works. 

• Publication Year : 1915
• My Rating:  4/5

Find the book on Goodreads  |  Amazon

Connect with me on  Instagram  |  Twitter  |  Goodreads

Share this:

Book reviews.

A BTS event, a life of interests, and simple enjoyment

Cycles: the simplest, proven method to innovate faster while reducing risks – book review, skadegemutc: ghost witch by isabella steel – book review, 2 thoughts on “the metamorphosis by franz kafka – book review”.

Kafka is so so under rated. I believe

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

The Metamorphosis

Franz kafka, everything you need for every book you read..

Gregor Samsa , a traveling salesman, wakes up one morning and discovers that he's transformed into a giant cockroach (or some similar oversized, insect-like vermin). He realizes he's missed his train, and gets acquainted with his awkward new body as he worries about his stressful salesman job. His mother , father , and sister Grete realize something's amiss and knock at his door, but he finds he can't produce human speech and also can't open the door. His boss, the Chief Clerk , arrives, and scolds him for his tardiness and strange behavior, even suggesting that his job might be in danger. Gregor finally opens his door with difficulty and gives the Chief Clerk a long speech about his dutifulness to his job. But no one understands the speech, his family is shocked at his appearance, and the Chief Clerk runs away. Gregor injures himself when he squeezes back through the doorway into his bedroom.

Gregor finds that Grete has brought him some fresh food, which doesn't appeal to him. Gregor resolves to help his family deal with the trouble he's causing them with his metamorphosis. The following morning Grete brings Gregor rotting food, and he eats hungrily. Gregor overhears the family talking about their finances, and determining that they will have to go back to work, now that he can no longer provide for them. Gregor feels upset and sorry that he can't support them anymore. About a month passes, with Grete taking care of Gregor less and less attentively. One day Grete sees Gregor out of his hiding place and is disturbed. Another month passes, then Gregor's mother wants to come help Grete and support Gregor. Grete and the mother plan to move Gregor's old furniture out so he can crawl more freely, but Gregor decides that he wants to keep his furniture, which links him to his humanity. He climbs the wall and places himself over his print of the lady with the muff , which shocks his mother when she returns to the room, causing her to faint. Gregor's father returns home and finds Gregor panicking in the dining room. Gregor's father pelts Gregor with apples, one of which severely injures him.

Another month passes while Gregor recovers from his injury. His family members are exhausted from working, and Gregor feels neglected. The family takes on three lodgers for additional income, and Gregor feels even more ignored. One night Grete plays her violin for the lodgers. Though the lodgers seem bored, Gregor is profoundly affected, and crawls out of his room, enjoying the beautiful music and optimistic that he'll be able to help his family and become close to Grete again. The lodgers notice Gregor with disgust, and decide that they'll leave and not even pay for the time they'd stayed so far. Grete tells her mother and father that the cockroach, which she can't even believe is Gregor, has ruined their lives. Gregor feebly returns to his room, thinks of his family with love, and dies. The charwoman who cleans the house discovers his body the next morning. Grete, her mother and father decide to take off work. They go to the countryside by tram, and talk happily about future plans, and finding a new apartment. Gregor's mother and father realize that it is time to find a husband for Grete.

Iowa State Daily

• Cyclones unite for Forever True Day 2024
• Secretary of ag emphasizes drought, meat producer rights
• ‘Slipped through the cracks’: Joint StuGov, Ames City Council meeting canceled
• Essential information for the upcoming solar eclipse
• PHOTOS: Iowa State softball takes down UNI 8-3
• Men's basketball end of season awards
• Northern Iowa guard Nate Heise stays in-state, set to join Cyclones
• BREAKING: Sexual assault reported at Larch Hall
• Lincoln Way, Interstate on-ramp closures
• Cyclone linebacker room focuses on growth, leadership with new coach

Book Review: “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka

“Gregor reconciled himself quite easily to the shutting of the door, for often enough on evenings when it was opened he had disregarded it entirely and lain in the darkest corner of his room, quite unnoticed by the family.” – Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka is a writer who has developed somewhat of a cult following through his “Kafkaesque” surrealism, where readers are pulled into a story that seems completely devoid of any honest reality but is still somehow relatable. This “closeness” doesn’t have anything to do with the plot, but rather with the theme. We do not actually believe that any of us would morph into a giant insect one morning, but we do believe that alienation from something hinders us all. 

Many of you may have already read this short work. “The Metamorphosis” has attracted frequent attention ever since it was first published in 1915.

This is due to its existentialist appeal. This detail makes the story particularly popular. It is the same reason why writers like Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jean-Paul Sartre (to list a few totemic names) are so popular. There is something that good observers who are also good writers can communicate that the rest of us seem to lack. There is an aspect of our existence that maintains its absurdity, and we need absurd writers to design absurd depictions of it in order to stay in touch with ourselves.

Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of “The Metamorphosis,” is one such example. Kafka, who famously had issues with his father (and presumably the rest of his family), created an abstraction that lured readers into his alienated mind.

When Samsa wakes up in his bed as a giant insect, Kafka relays that he wakes up feeling completely detached from what makes him human. He is afraid of his family seeing him, and he isn’t eager to see them either. This feeling intensifies, not only with Samsa’s family but with his boss, who arrives at the house to question Samsa about why he did not show up for work. 

Samsa’s room—and the door which he is terribly glad he locked—represent a sort of symbolic barrier throughout the book. Samsa is feared amongst all and simply withers his existence away, stuck as a giant insect and hiding all alone. 

I think what is particularly interesting about the novel is how Kafka doesn’t necessarily focus on how odd it is that Samsa is an insect. Instead, Kafka writes about it as if it were an odd mishap, illustrating, for me at least, how Kafka began to know alienation as a fundamental component of himself and his relationships. 

I highly recommend this story, although I will say that I believe the hype surrounding it is somewhat trite. This goes for many of the books I have reviewed thus far. When people desire to be “edgy” or “different” by reading stories like this, it takes away from the experience and turns it into a contest of who is more fashionable. 

Unfortunately, this book, and Kafka in particular, have been victims of this trend. However, it is only due to Kafka’s greatness. This story is about the dangers of having the unwillingness to take action or to improve oneself and one’s situation.

Read it. Digest it. Learn. 

Rating 7/10

• book review

Your donation will support the student journalists of the Iowa State Daily. Your contribution will allow us to purchase equipment, send our student journalists to conferences and off-set their cost of living so they can continue to do best-in-the-nation work at the Iowa State Daily.

The independent student newspaper of Iowa State and Ames since 1890

• Advertise with Us!

Comments (1)

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Quinn Young | Mar 8, 2024 at 12:26 pm

Check out Gravity’s Rainbow. That book took me out (4 months to read it) but it’s really good imo

Best Fredrik Backman Books To Read & Understand Life! 📚

Best Monster Books To Read And Get Thrilled! 📚

Best Hercule Poirot Books To Start Reading First! 🕵️‍♂️ 📚

Best Agatha Christie Audiobooks You Should Listen! 🕵️ 🎧

Best Book Depository Alternatives – 12 Affordable Sites! 📚

The Metamorphosis – Best Franz Kafka Book For Beginners! 👌

• ⏳ [read_meter]

Reading is considered a habit that is pretty much capable of transforming a person. When you read a book, your brain goes through a wide range of experiences. Your brain learns to focus on the words and builds a connection with the story. Some books are so wonderful that they give your mind this euphoric experience of imagining a world larger than your life. So, the point is, every book changes you, every story transforms you, and reading as a habit in itself is a kind of Metamorphosis.

The Metamorphosis (Review)

The Metamorphosis is one of those rare books that completely sucks you in and shows you a world so distorted, dark, and yet so real that your mind learns the art of imagination. You start imagining; you see figures and shapes inside your mind that connect you with the book on a very different level. I like to classify my reading journey into two parts – the pre-Kafka phase and the post-Kafka phase.

The day I read Metamorphosis was also the day I decided I would never give up on reading. Reading is one of the most fulfilling experiences ever. And especially if you are reading a Franz Kafka book, the effect is going to be crazy. Franz Kafka was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century literature. He was a Bohemian novelist and short story writer. Born in Prague (now the capital of the Czech Republic), Kafka explored the themes of alienation, existential crisis, absurdity, etc.

Recommended Reading For You! 📖 📚

Other than ‘The Metamorphosis’, Kafka wrote ‘The Trial’ and ‘The Castle’ widely acknowledged and loved greatly. Kafka used to write a lot of letters to his friends and family members. In his lifetime, Kafka engaged several women but could never marry any of them. His letters to those women are also widely loved and appreciated because of the sheer vulnerability and honesty with which those letters were written.

However, Kafka was not a full-time writer; he used to write in his spare time. He was a lawyer and worked full-time at an insurance company. His middle-class upbringing taught him a lot about society and its classification, which was also the reason why he understood the plight of common men so well. When you read his books, you will recognize that Kafka felt deeply for the sufferings of the common men who had to suffer endlessly because of the corruption running in the social system.

His books present the reality of the modern world vividly, and anyone can relate to his writing, even today. His stories are still relevant, and most of the common men resonate with his characters and stories. There is a term in the English language called ‘Kafkaesque’, which basically means ‘situations like those that you find in Kafka’s writing’. The term ‘Kafkaesque’ consists of surreal distortions, a sense of impending danger, menacing complexities, etc.

The Metamorphosis, originally written in German, titled ‘Die Verwandlung’, is a novella and one of Kafka’s best-known works. The plot of the novella follows the story of a traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa. One morning he wakes up and finds himself completely transformed into a ‘monstrous vermin’. Gregor’s Metamorphosis from a human being to a huge insect shocks him, but he thinks of the transformation as something temporary.

And instead of thinking about his distressed and bizarre state, Gregor starts thinking about his job and his employer, who would definitely fire him for his absence. But there is nothing much Gregor can do, as it is very difficult for him to function in his newly transformed body. And soon enough, his office manager comes to his house to check up on him and know the reason behind his sudden absence.

Gregor tries to communicate from behind his room’s closed door, but his family and the office manager cannot understand anything, as his voice becomes completely incomprehensible. Finally, Gregor somehow drags himself to open the door, and seeing him, the office manager takes off, and his family members end up utterly terrified. The story then begins, and we get to see how his life completely transforms. The metaphor and the symbolism in this book are taught to so many literature students worldwide in various educational institutions.

This book is not just about Gregor Samsa’s physical Metamorphosis; it’s more about the change in people’s behavior when a person becomes weak. Gregor was the only earning member of his family. Therefore, he tended to all the needs of his father, mother, and sister. He sacrificed his own needs and wants in order to tend to his family’s desires. But after his Metamorphosis, he became completely useless; and henceforth, his family began treating him accordingly.

If you observe and understand the symbolism properly, you will notice the similarities between Gregor and people going through some kind of illness. Diseases and illnesses transform a man into an insect that becomes an unnecessary burden on a family and society. The people around that person forget everything that he or she must have done before. They only see the uselessness of his existence and start treating him as a burden.

Franz Kafka’s novella ‘The Metamorphosis’ comes with a lot of lessons. It shocks you and opens your eyes. The symbolism and metaphors are easy and traceable. But, I wonder what led Kafka to write a book so heavy and dark. The book encompasses so many varied emotions that it gets pretty daunting for the reader. Nevertheless, this book is one of the most stunning books ever written in the history of literature. It’s a Franz Kafka masterpiece. So, like me, if you are a literature lover, then you should definitely go ahead and read this book. I am hundred percent sure you are going to love this book so much! You can get the book here! 📖

The Metamorphosis

URL: https://bookwritten.com/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka-review/4649/

Author: Franz Kafka

This article contains affiliate links. BookWritten may earn a commission when you buy using these links.

BookWritten Newsletter 📧 📖

Join 10,000 plus subscribers. Get updates about the best books to read, special content, and exclusive offers online! 📚

You might also like these!

The American Prometheus: The Story Behind Oppenheimer!

Who Will Cry When You Die? – Live Your Life To The Fullest!

Sneha Banerjee has been writing for half a decade now. She is also a professional copywriter and has worked for many businesses. She is a voracious reader, and her ultimate dream is to turn everyone into a reader.

Follow author

Let's discuss here - Share your thoughts and queries!

• Do You Have Any Questions or Thoughts? 💬

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

• Kindle Store
• Kindle eBooks
• Teen & Young Adult

Promotions apply when you purchase

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

Audiobook Price: $2.44 $2.44

Save: $0.45 $0.45 (18%)

Buy for others

Buying and sending ebooks to others.

• Select quantity
• Buy and send eBooks
• Recipients can read on any device

These ebooks can only be redeemed by recipients in the US. Redemption links and eBooks cannot be resold.

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the authors

The Metamorphosis Kindle Edition

• Reading age 12 years and up
• Print length 121 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Pomodoro Books
• Publication date December 12, 2023
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• See all details

Customers who bought this item also bought

Editorial Reviews

"Kafka expertly portrays the vagaries of the human heart--all of its sad glory and tinny selfishness--in a recording that the gifted Martin Jarvis elevates to an audio classic, employing his storytelling skills and knowing inflections in a lively and charming narration occasionally punctuated by scratchy, whimsical violins. Jarvis has firmly established himself as a source of finely nuanced theater of the mind. This unforgettable audio movie is vivid and disturbing, shot through with black humor. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award."

About the Author

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), one of the major fiction writers of the twentieth century, was born to a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague. His unique body of writing, much of which is incomplete and was mainly published posthumously, is considered by some people to be among the most influential in Western literature, inspiring such writers as Albert Camus, Rex Warner, and Samuel Beckett.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0C8B3NYMX
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pomodoro Books (December 12, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ December 12, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 785 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 121 pages
• Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ B0CJ4CY3TP
• #20 in Teen & Young Adult Literary Fiction
• #22 in Teen & Young Adult School & Education Fiction eBooks
• #32 in Teen & Young Adult Classic eBooks

About the authors

Franz kafka.

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. During his lifetime, he published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.

Franz Kafka (Praga, Imperio austrohúngaro, 3 de julio de 1883 - Kierling, Austria, 3 de junio de 1924) fue un escritor de origen judío nacido en Bohemia que escribió en alemán. Su obra está considerada una de las más influyentes de la literatura universal y está llena de temas y arquetipos sobre la alienación, la brutalidad física y psicológica, los conflictos entre padres e hijos, personajes en aventuras terroríficas, laberintos de burocracia, y transformaciones místicas.

Fue autor de tres novelas, El proceso (Der Prozeß), El castillo (Das Schloß) y El desaparecido (Amerika o Der Verschollene), la novela corta La metamorfosis (Die Verwandlung) y un gran número de relatos cortos. Además, dejó una abundante correspondencia y escritos autobiográficos. Su peculiar estilo literario ha sido comúnmente asociado con la filosofía artística del existencialismo --al que influenció-- y el expresionismo. Estudiosos de Kafka discuten sobre cómo interpretar al autor, algunos hablan de la posible influencia de alguna ideología política antiburocrática, de una religiosidad mística o de una reivindicación de su minoría etnocultural, mientras otros se fijan en el contenido psicológico de sus obras. Sus relaciones personales también tuvieron gran impacto en su escritura, particularmente su padre (Carta al padre), su prometida Felice Bauer (Cartas a Felice) y su hermana (Cartas a Ottla).

El término kafkiano se usa en el idioma español para describir situaciones surrealistas como las que se encuentran en sus libros y tiene sus equivalentes en otros idiomas. Solo unas pocas de sus obras fueron publicadas durante su vida. La mayor parte, incluyendo trabajos incompletos, fueron publicados por su amigo Max Brod, quien ignoró los deseos del autor de que los manuscritos fueran destruidos.

Ginger Gillenwater

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Awesome, you're subscribed!

Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon!

The best of London for free.

Sign up for our email to enjoy London without spending a thing (as well as some options when you’re feeling flush).

Déjà vu! We already have this email. Try another?

By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions.

Love the mag?

Our newsletter hand-delivers the best bits to your inbox. Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions.

• Things to Do
• Food & Drink
• Coca-Cola Foodmarks
• Attractions
• Los Angeles

Get us in your inbox

🙌 Awesome, you're subscribed!

Metamorphosis

• Theatre, Experimental
• 3 out of 5 stars
• Recommended

Time Out says

Lemn Sissay’s meditative adaptation is compelling but takes the punch away from the Kafka classic

Lemn Sissay and Frantic Assembly’s brooding, expanded take on Kafka’s immortal novella likes to toy with our expectations. 

If you’ve made it through life without reading ‘Metamorphosis’, then to summarise: Gregor Samsa, a salesman, wakes up one day to discover he’s inexplicably turned into a sort of gross giant insect thing, and is suddenly shunned by a world he worked pathetically hard to fit in with. 

In Scott Graham’s production, though, we spend a lot more time with Gregor’s pre-transformation, as Felipe Pacheco’s protagonist rises every morning, ready to face another soul-crushing day of flogging textiles. As he begins to sleep in late, miss his sales targets and vomit from stress, his movements become erratic, and he is increasingly greeted by looks of horror from his mum, dad and sister Grete. Each time this happens we suspect he’s transformed… and for almost an hour he hasn’t.

It’s a mischievous deviation from the book. And one that changes the arc of the story somewhat. While it’s rare that stage adaptations of ‘Metamorphosis’ have the actor playing Gregor literally togged up as a beetle or whatever, there’s a definite ambiguity within poet Sissay’s adaptation as to what exactly is happening to him. Gregor’s physical and mental decline is palpable from the start, suggestive of the fact that his metamorphosis is not a sudden thing, as in the book, but a gradual process. His family only seems to judge his worth by how much money he can make them: whether he’s literally turned into a monster or whether they see him as one because he can no longer work is a point never clarified. 

Sissay’s adaptation does add some supporting evidence for the latter theory: Troy Glasgow’s creepy Mr Sansa reveals Gregor was adopted, and is valued far less than biological daughter Greta.

Whatever the true nature of Gregor’s change, Pacheco busts out some truly astonishing physical feats – Frantic Assembly’s hallmark. He scuttles and crawls unnaturally – often in apparent defiance of gravity – over people, things, the nooks and crannies of Jon Bausor’s set; at one point he ‘sits’ upside down on the ceiling light, a move I’ve only previously seen carried off in Spider-Man films.

Still, there’s something that doesn’t gel about this adaptation. Sissay’s poetic expansion of the story is effective initially but ends up blunting Kafka’s brutally sharp satire. In the second half Gregor is a background adornment, which robs the denouement of its pathos. Kafka’s railing against the dehumanising nature of capitalism is punchy and incisive; Sissay kind of rams the same point home for two-and-a-half hours. 

It’s a solidly atmospheric production with real physical verve, but ironically it comes across as transitional, caught between Kafka’s terseness and Sissay’s desire to craft something more expansive. It’s trapped, mid-metamorphosis.

An email you’ll actually love

Discover Time Out original video

• Press office
• Investor relations
• Work for Time Out
• Editorial guidelines
• Privacy notice
• Do not sell my information
• Cookie policy
• Accessibility statement
• Terms of use
• Modern slavery statement
• Manage cookies
• Claim your listing
• Time Out Offers FAQ
• Advertising
• Time Out Market

Time Out products

• Time Out Offers
• Time Out Worldwide