The Metamorphosis

Summary

The Metamorphosis is a novella in three parts about Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman in cloth who supports his parents and his seventeen-year-old sister Grete, and who wakes one morning in his room to find that he has been changed into a monstrous insect. Kafka tells the story plainly, in the third person and almost entirely from Gregor's point of view, never explaining the transformation and never letting it become a dream. In Part I Gregor lies on his armored back, worrying chiefly that he has missed the early train and will lose his job. His family knock at the locked door, and the chief clerk of his firm arrives to demand an explanation, hinting that Gregor is suspected of mishandling money. Gregor learns to move his many small legs, turns the key with his jaws and appears in the doorway. The clerk flees in horror, his mother collapses, and his father drives him back into the room with a walking stick and a newspaper, wounding him on the door frame. In Part II the family adjusts. Grete brings Gregor food, discovering that he now prefers half-rotten leftovers, and cleans his room while he hides under the couch. Gregor overhears that his father had kept back savings from the failed family business, and that Gregor's years of labor had paid a debt the family could have managed otherwise. Grete and her mother decide to clear out his furniture so he can crawl freely; Gregor, alarmed at losing every sign of his human past, clings to a framed picture of a lady in furs. His mother sees him and faints, and his father, now in a bank messenger's uniform, pelts him with apples. One lodges in his back. In Part III the rotting apple and the wound weaken Gregor. The family take jobs, dismiss the maid, hire a gaunt old charwoman, and rent a room to three bearded lodgers. One evening Grete plays the violin for the lodgers; Gregor, drawn by the music, creeps into the living room, the lodgers see him and give notice, and Grete declares that the creature is not Gregor and must go. Gregor returns to his room, thinks of his family with tenderness and love, and dies before dawn. The charwoman sweeps the body away. The father dismisses the lodgers, and the three Samsas write letters excusing themselves from work and take a tram into the spring countryside, where the parents notice that Grete has become a lovely young woman ready for a husband. Kafka wrote the story in late 1912. It appeared in the monthly Die weißen Blätter in October 1915 and as a small book from Kurt Wolff in Leipzig later that year. The library does not include a full text: the German original is in the public domain, but no English translation has been verified as public domain.

Top Lessons

• Worth beyond usefulness

  While Gregor earns money he is the center of the household; once he cannot work, his family come to see him as a burden. The story presses the question of whether a person's value lies in what he provides.

• The slow wearing-out of care

  Grete begins as a devoted nurse and ends as the one who says Gregor must go. Kafka shows, without commentary, how patience can erode under fatigue, shame and money worries.

• The inner person behind a changed body

  Gregor keeps his memories, his love for his family and his response to music even as his body and habits change. The reader knows what his family cannot see, and the gap between the two drives the story's pathos.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Read medically, the story is a study of a family's response to a sudden, disabling and stigmatizing change in one member: the first shock, the attempt at home nursing by a sister, the economic strain, the shame before outsiders, and the relief at death. Kafka worked for years assessing industrial injury claims, and many readers see his professional knowledge of disablement in the story, though this is interpretation. Gregor's festering apple wound, loss of appetite and wasting are given in physical detail. Kafka's own tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1917, after the story was written, so readings of the novella as an illness narrative about his disease are anachronistic; the theme of a body that betrays the self belongs to the story on its own terms.

• Part I

  Gregor's first attempts to control an unfamiliar body, and his injury on the door frame when his father forces him back.

• Part II

  Grete's home nursing: food left out, the room cleaned, the decision to remove furniture, and the mother's fainting at the sight of her son.

• Part II, end, and Part III

  The apple lodged in Gregor's back becomes an inflamed wound that weakens him over the following weeks.

• Part III

  Gregor stops eating, wastes away, and dies alone at dawn; the charwoman finds the dried body and the family feels relief.