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.ġ0. As Gregor struggles to crawl off his bed, a clerk from his company calls at the Samsa apartment. 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”. Another is that it is, amid its pathos, awfully funny. 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.Ĩ. A century on, why does Metamorphosis still attract readers? One reason is that it’s a horror story of sorts. Finally Metamorphosis was set before readers in October 1915, in the avant-garde monthly Die Weissen Blätter, then put between covers that December.ħ. But negotiations with publishers were complicated, and circumstances – the first world war, among other things – intervened.Ħ. Kafka worked on Metamorphosis through the autumn of 1912 and completed a version on 7 December that year. At least, 1915 is when the story was published, which is to say “finished” and Kafka, famously, didn’t finish very much.ĥ. Here, though, is a little novelty: in 2015, Metamorphosis is 100 years old. 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.Ĥ. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women.3. ‘This getting up early,’ he thought, ‘makes a man quite idiotic. He slid back again into his earlier position. But he retracted it immediately, for the contact felt like a cold shower all over him. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bed post so that he could lift his head more easily, found the itchy part, which was entirely covered with small white spots (he did not know what to make of them), and wanted to feel the place with a leg. To hell with it all!’ He felt a slight itching on the top of his abdomen. The stresses of trade are much greater than the work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I have to deal with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart. ‘O God,’ he thought, ‘what a demanding job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out on the road. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes, so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side which he had never felt before. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn’t get himself into this position. ‘Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness,’ he thought. The dreary weather (the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge) made him quite melancholy. Gregor’s glance then turned to the window. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out (Samsa was a traveling salesman) hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place.
He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections.
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
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