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The Metamorphosis · Companion GuideStories · Issue 00

The Metamorphosis in 10 Minutes: How a Traveling Salesman Became His Family's Vermin

Kafka's beetle, and why it still stings today

Text and illustrations produced by the pipeline

ImaReadFolio 02 — 05

推销员格里高尔·萨姆沙一天清晨醒来，发现自己在睡梦中变成了一只巨大的甲虫状生物，起初只担心自己上班要迟到 — 推销员格里高尔清晨醒来，变成了巨大的甲虫

The Opening: You Wake Up Transformed, and Being Late Is Still Your First Worry

Gregor wakes one morning already transformed. He has become an enormous vermin, some blurred, indescribable shape that makes you want to recoil on instinct. But he can't even turn over, and the first thing on his mind is the train timetable by his bed, his boss's impatient face, and the fact that if he doesn't get out the door soon, he won't get paid this month.

That's exactly what makes the book so uncomfortable: an absolute nightmare, handled by the person living it in the most familiar tone of an office worker. By the third page you'll suddenly realize you've started calculating along with Gregor whether this new body can even squeeze onto the streetcar, without ever asking the one question you'd expect to ask first: why is this happening?

What This Book Is

The Metamorphosis is a novella Franz Kafka wrote in the early twentieth century, formally published in 1915. Its place in literary history is a strange one: shorter than a quarter or fifth of an ordinary novel, and yet it single-handedly gave the language an adjective, Kafkaesque, used specifically for situations where the rules go unexplained, the absurdity goes unexplained, and you still have no choice but to keep living through it. It stands as one of the sources behind existentialism, the theater of the absurd, and countless later works about a person who simply doesn't fit the world.

Nearly the entire story is locked inside the cramped apartment of the Samsa family. The text never names the Central European city where it takes place, and the only hint of the world outside is a faint, uneasy tension in the background, the air of the years just before the First World War. One small space, one family, a few months of time, that is all the material Kafka needs to lay bare the thing modern people fear most.

ImaRead2

ImaReadFolio 03 — 05

格里高尔挣扎着想开门去上班，公司协理登门催促，格里高尔的怪异形貌与叫声吓坏了家人和协理，协理仓皇逃走 — 格里高尔在门后挣扎，协理吓得仓皇逃走

家人将格里高尔反锁在房间里；父亲第一次动怒用手杖和报纸把他逼回房间，格里高尔身体受伤 — 父亲用手杖和报纸把格里高尔逼回房间

ImaReadFolio 04 — 05

起初只有妹妹格蕾特愿意每天给格里高尔送食物、清理房间，并摸索出他爱吃腐坏食物而非新鲜食物的习性 — 妹妹格蕾特每天给格里高尔送食物并清理房间

父亲重新找到工作，母亲和妹妹也各自打零工补贴家用，一家人的经济角色发生翻转，格里高尔从顶梁柱沦为累赘 — 家人各自外出挣钱养家，格里高尔成了累赘

ImaReadFolio 05 — 05

Then there's the door that refuses to explain. From start to finish, the book never says why Gregor became what he became, no curse, no magic, no scientist, no device that lets you slap your knee and say, ah, so that's it. That refusal to explain is itself the answer, for Kafka, the absurd is absurd precisely because it never hands you a decent reason.

Kafka isn't writing about how a man turns into a bug. He's writing about how a family slowly decides that he already is one.

Why It's Still Worth Reading Today

The Metamorphosis was written more than a century ago, but the fear it's really about, the fear of being reduced to your usefulness, is one that almost no one finds foreign, whether they're an office worker, the family member of a patient, or a middle-aged person who's lost their job. That's why reading it still hurts today, you're not frightened by an absurd story, you're quietly caught out by a description that stays far too calm.

You Already Know What Happens, So Why Read the Actual Text

The explainer has given you the plot. But there are two things it can never give you. The first is the texture of the prose itself, the sense of being slowly skinned by the author in the calmest possible voice, Gregor, taking the apple's wound, still thinking about how much money he owes his family this month, and that coldness only really cuts into you once you read it, page by page, yourself. The second is the physical sense of it: the effort of Gregor climbing the wall, the clumsiness of forcing the door open, the tremor at the moment he hears the violin, these are things you can only feel by breathing along with his movements. Reading it after already knowing the ending actually hurts more, because you can finally watch, with full attention, exactly how a man who is already doomed manages, bit by bit, to live himself into being vermin.

Art Direction4 plates

Before the guide was written, this book got a visual foundation — every illustration you just read grew out of it.

Character · The Metamorphosis in 10 Minutes: How a Traveling Salesman Became His Family's Vermin — 01Charactercharacter

World · The Metamorphosis in 10 Minutes: How a Traveling Salesman Became His Family's Vermin

Later, to bring in one more income, the family rents out rooms to three lodgers. In the novella they barely register as individuals; their only role is being "the three of them," outsiders whose presence is what finally lets Gregor's secret be discovered by someone outside the family, and it is their reaction that forces Grete's coldest line in the whole book out of her.

The Plot: From a Door That Won't Open to a Late-Night Death from the Apple's Wound

The story begins with Gregor struggling to open his door. He wants to catch his train, and the chief clerk sent by his firm is already outside, pressing him to hurry. His new body simply won't obey him: he works the key with his mouth and forces the door open an inch at a time with his body, and then the man outside sees a huge insect-like creature making strange noises. The chief clerk bolts on the spot, and that is the last time Gregor appears, in any social sense, as a human being.

Next comes the first time Gregor's own body turns against him. The father rushes back and sees not his son but a strange thing wedged in the doorframe. He grabs his cane, rolls up a newspaper, and in the manner of someone disciplining a disobedient animal, drives Gregor step by step back into his room. The door is locked from outside, and from then on Gregor loses the run of the whole apartment, all that's left to him is his own bedroom, with its one window.

The first stroke of genius in how this is written shows up right here. The injury Gregor takes as he's driven back into his room isn't fatal, but Kafka sets it down in a tone that's almost like bookkeeping, placing the injury and missing today's pay side by side on the same day. As you keep reading you realize the author never meant for you to pity this bug, he has you, right alongside Gregor, treating the humiliation as just one more piece of business to get through quickly. That coldness is exactly what later came to be called Kafkaesque.

Through the days he's locked away, the only person willing to enter Gregor's room is his sister, Grete. At first she brings him food every day, cleans his room, and works out that Gregor now prefers rotten food to fresh, this passage is one of the rare, almost tender stretches in the whole book. A reader could almost believe that blood ties can hold against anything.

But right around this time, the household's economic structure quietly flips. The father puts on a respectable uniform and goes back out to work, the mother and sister each pick up piecework and sewing jobs. Gregor goes from being the family's pillar to the one who has to be supported by everyone else, and he can't even tell them that he's still conscious in there, that he can still understand every word. The tone the family uses when they speak of him slides, almost without anyone noticing, from how are you feeling to a mutter about a problem that needs handling.

What finally turns that slide into an open wound is the father hurling an apple. One apple lodges in the shell of Gregor's back and stays there, slowly rotting, inflaming, festering. From that point on Gregor moves more and more slowly, and the strength that once let him climb the walls and ceiling drains out of him bit by bit. That apple is the single most concrete symbol in the whole book, it isn't a blow that lands and passes, it's a thing that goes in and is left to rot there.

The decisive night arrives. In the sitting room, the sister plays her violin for the three lodgers, and Gregor, drawn by the music, drags his injured body out of his room an inch at a time, perhaps he only wants to hear, once more, a sound that once belonged to him, a sound with some warmth of ordinary life still in it. The three lodgers catch sight of him and slam their hands on the table on the spot: they will move out immediately unless compensated. A crisis that had only ever been about whether Gregor stays or goes suddenly becomes, because of these outsiders, a financial crisis for the whole family.

It's on this same night that Grete says, for the first time, to her parents the thing she would once never have let herself say: they have to get rid of this creature, and they must stop calling it their brother. The cruelty of that sentence isn't in get rid of, it's in stop calling him our brother. The blood tie is declared, out loud, null and void. Grete, the tenderness of the whole book, turns into the hand that pushes the ending forward.

On the night that follows, Gregor lies alone in his room. He no longer eats the rotting food, not because he doesn't want to, but because the apple wound has left his body less and less his to command. He hears his family retreat to their rooms one by one, hears the whole apartment settle slowly into silence. He thinks of how much he loves them, and then he thinks that he must disappear. In the end he dies quietly in the dark, and Kafka lets no one hear it happen.

The next morning, the charwoman finds Gregor's body already cold and stiff, and sweeps it out of the way as casually as she would an old piece of furniture that's become a nuisance. In that one passage, the novella knocks down every expectation of tragedy the reader might still be carrying: he isn't mourned. He's disposed of.

The ending is the most ironic passage in the whole book. The three remaining Samsas, relieved, decide to take the day off and go out to the countryside. They ride the streetcar through a sunlit country road, and the father and mother look at Grete, who has grown into a full young woman, and start calculating that it's time to find her a good match. It's the first time in months the family has thought about the future together, and in that future, there is no Gregor.

What It's Really About: Alienation, Love, and a Door That Refuses to Explain

On the surface, The Metamorphosis is about the strange event of a man turning into a bug. Underneath, it's about something far more ordinary: how fast a person, once he loses the label useful, gets treated as a nuisance in the eyes of others, including the eyes of his own family. Gregor's insect shell is only a metaphor; what actually turns him into vermin is the change in how his family treats him. Kafka's genius is in making that metaphor impossible to argue with, Gregor really is a bug, so no one can say otherwise.

Another theme is the split between the body and the self. Gregor's mind stays lucid from beginning to end, he misses home, aches for his parents, is moved by his sister's violin, but his shell can no longer carry any of that feeling out into the world. I and my body become two beings locked in separate rooms. That's why so many readers see themselves in Gregor: trapped by a job, a family role, an identity, unable to make anyone hear him even when he shouts, this is me.