The Metamorphosis

Traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes one morning transformed into what Kafka's German calls an ungeheures Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin whose exact shape the novella never actually specifies. Kafka insisted the creature never be drawn or shown even at a distance, and the ambiguity is deliberate rather than an accident of translation; English editions have rendered the phrase more than a dozen different ways, from insect to cockroach to Vladimir Nabokov's own insistence, based on details in the text, that Gregor is a winged beetle rather than the crawling cockroach popular culture usually pictures. Gregor's family, who depended on his salary, react with horror and then obligation, keeping him locked in his room and feeding him increasingly little care as their own patience wears down. His sister Grete, his one real advocate at first, eventually turns against him too, telling their parents plainly that the creature can no longer be treated as Gregor at all and must be gotten rid of. Weakened, unwanted, and starving after refusing food he can no longer stomach, Gregor dies alone in his room before dawn, and the family's cleaning woman finds and disposes of the body with brisk indifference. The novella's last pages follow the family, relieved rather than grieving, on a hopeful outing to plan their move to a smaller apartment, noticing along the way that Grete has grown into a young woman ready for marriage.

Kafka renders the entire transformation in flat, matter of fact prose that treats the fantastic premise as an ordinary domestic inconvenience, which is exactly what makes the story's alienation land so hard. It reads quickly for its length but repays slow attention, since Kafka never explains the change and never lets his characters ask the questions a reader most wants answered.

It is the longest of the stories Kafka completed and published in his lifetime, though his diary records his own dislike of its ending, and it remains the most widely translated and discussed of his shorter works.