The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. rating=5

click above for story

or here: http://www.mala.bc.ca/~Johnstoi/stories/kafka-E.htm

this is another 5 :)

it’s very short; not even a hundred pages. (and as such I don’t want to quote it much.) it’s a perfect example of the absurd, and of our absurd human tendencies in life.

the story is about Gregor Samsa, who, in the very first sentence, wakes up to find that he has been transformed into a hideous bug.

in fact, it is very like Nikolai Gogol’s story The Nose, in which a man wakes up to find that his nose is not on his face. The Nose is about the man looking all over to find his nose, because he just cannot figure where it has gotten off to, and we are never enlightened as to how this could have come about, really, only that apparently it could happen to anyone. and when the man finally does find his nose, it’s dressed in a uniform [etf freudian slip: I put it was wearing an overcoat; this was the title of another of Gogol's short stories!] walking down the street. the man says, in effect, “Hey, aren’t you my nose?!?”, but, poor fellow, he is of such a low station in life that even his own nose is of higher rank than he is, and it does not deign to stop and talk with him.

in The Metamorphosis, Gregor has been turned into a hideous vermin, some sort of monstrous beetley-cockroach thing, but keeps his human, travelling-salesman, dutiful son and brother mind. and we never know how or why he was changed into a bug, and it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. but Gregor, who has slept through the alarm, what with being changed into a different life form and all, is of course very concerned with the most pressing of urgencies: getting to work and apologizing for missing the early train. and, of course, Gregor is quite depressed and melancholy: about the rainy weather.

the scene where the manager comes to Gregor’s house to find out what’s going on is horrible and amazingly comic: here we have Gregor as a giant roach trying to convince his boss that he really is a good employee, and he’ll be back on the job at no time at all.

the second half of the work is perhaps a bit darker but all the more enlightenting and bizarre. for such a ridiculous prospect, Kafka makes very bold and enduring statements about family, self-identity, alienation, guilt, and literature/ being a writer.

apparently people have built careers around analyzing Franz Kafka’s work, esp this story, and I can see why. I say read it :)