He (understandably) loses his job and his family keep him hidden from the rest of the world, their disgust turning to neglect before he finally dies and the family essentially lives happily ever after. The basic premise of this story is that a travelling salesman who’s been supporting his family wakes up one morning and discovers that he’s turned into a bug. I thought I might include my views of this story before my ideas are influenced by the in-depth reviews already out there. ![]() I read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka as the first title for my 2015 Summer Reading Challenge, this is a book that’s been studied my literature students for decades but somehow escaped me until last week. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern 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. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. ![]() His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was ab out to slide off completely. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
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