Metamorphosis

<i>When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. </i> <p/>With this startling bizarre yet surprisingly funny first sentence Kafka begins his masterpiece <i>The Metamorphosis</i>. 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 <i>The Metamorphosis</i> has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. <p/>As W.H. Auden wrote Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.