The Metamorphosis

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” . With this  startling bizarre yet surprisingly funny first sentence Kafka begins his masterpiece The  Metamorphosis. It is the story of a  young man who transformed overnight into a giant  beetlelike 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.”