The Metamorphosis: the insect nobody has ever seen

<p>The story opens with one of the most quoted first sentences in literature: Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous vermin. What is striking is what comes next. There is no fright, no scream, no question about how it happened. Gregor looks at the clock, works out that he has missed the five o'clock train and frets about what his boss will say when he fails to turn up at the office.</p>
<p>That is the book's serious joke. Gregor is a travelling salesman who supports his parents and his sister and is paying off a debt his father ran up years before. Turned into an insect, his first worry is about work; his family's is about money. Nobody asks what has happened to him. They ask what will happen now to the household income.</p>
<p>Kafka never describes the creature. He uses a deliberately vague expression — something like "monstrous vermin" — and avoids any entomological detail. When his publisher planned an illustration for the cover, Kafka wrote asking that the insect itself not be drawn, not even seen from a distance. The ban makes sense: what matters is not Gregor's shape, but the way others look at him. To draw him is to turn him into a monster and take away the worst of it, which is that he is still himself.</p>
<p>The story's most effective element is the domestic bookkeeping that quietly takes over. The family discovers that it can work: the father finds a job, the mother takes in sewing, the sister starts at a shop. They also discover savings Gregor knew nothing about. As they come back to life, the back room turns into a junk room and its occupant into a nuisance that has to be fed. Grete, the sister, travels the furthest, from tenderness to exasperation, and is the one who finally says the words that decide the ending.</p>
<p>Read today, the story describes with uncomfortable precision what happens when a person stops being productive. Gregor is not rejected for being an insect, but for no longer contributing, and the whole household reorganises itself around that subtraction. <em>Severance</em>, the series in which a company splits its employees' consciousness in two so that one half exists only at the office, plays with the same idea: a worker is worth what he produces and is granted no life of his own beyond that. Kafka, who spent sixteen years at an insurance company writing reports on industrial accidents, knew what he was talking about.</p>
<p>Not everything keeps up the tension of the opening. The middle section wanders a little: the three lodgers the family takes in and the episode of the furniture being moved stretch out what the violin scene resolves far better. The parents, too, work more as roles than as characters, beside a Grete who genuinely changes.</p>
<p>At around sixty pages, it can be read in one sitting and leaves the feeling of having witnessed something both domestic and atrocious. It is best read without looking for a single interpretation: each reading offers one, and none exhausts the story.</p>
<h2>About the author</h2>
<p>Franz Kafka (Prague, 1883 – Kierling, Austria, 1924) wrote in German and worked almost all his life as a clerk at an insurance company. He published very little: <em>The Metamorphosis</em> appeared in 1915, and his novels <em>The Trial</em> and <em>The Castle</em> came out after his death. Before dying of tuberculosis at the age of forty, he asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts. Brod ignored him, and a good part of twentieth-century literature depends on that disobedience. His surname is now an everyday adjective: "Kafkaesque".</p>
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<p><em>To continue the series: <a href="/el-tunel-ernesto-sabato-resena">The Tunnel</a>, by Ernesto Sabato, another short novel narrated from a mind locked inside itself, and Animal Farm, by George Orwell, another seemingly simple fable that speaks of something very specific.</em></p>