- Person
- Franz Kafka
- Lived
- 1883–1924
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bohemian (Czech)
The story
In the late summer of 1912 Franz Kafka, a 29-year-old insurance lawyer in Prague who wrote in his free time, entered an intensely productive period. On the night of 22 September he wrote the story The Judgment in a single sitting, and in the following weeks and months he worked on his first novel and wrote The Metamorphosis.
The story begins with a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin. What follows is not a horror story but a quiet, painful account of how his family, who depended on his wages to pay off his father's debts, slowly come to see him as a burden. Only his sister Grete feeds him, and in the end even she decides that the creature is no longer her brother. Kafka treated the impossible with calm, precise realism, a combination that was entirely new.
At about 70 printed pages, it is the longest story Kafka considered complete and published in his lifetime. It was first printed in October 1915 in Die Weissen Blätter, a monthly magazine of expressionist literature edited by René Schickele, and appeared as a small book that December in the series Der jüngste Tag from Kurt Wolff in Leipzig. Kafka cared about every detail, writing to his publisher that the insect must not be drawn on the cover, not even from a distance.
Critics regard it as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century. The original German phrase for Gregor's new form is deliberately vague, and translators have argued for decades over whether to call him an insect, a bug or vermin. Vladimir Nabokov, an expert on butterflies as well as a novelist, lectured on the story and concluded from its details that Gregor was a large beetle.
The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez said that reading it showed him it was possible to write in a different way, and the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami later opened a story of his own with Gregor Samsa waking up transformed in reverse. It has been translated into many languages, adapted for film and stage, and is taught in schools around the world.
Why it matters
The Metamorphosis showed writers that the impossible could be told plainly, and it gives readers an unforgettable way to think about illness, dependence and belonging in a family.
About Franz Kafka
Author of "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial"; defined the modernist sense of alienation that bears his name, Kafkaesque.
More about Franz Kafka
- Franz Kafka edited A Hunger Artist on his deathbedDying of tuberculosis of the throat in 1924, Franz Kafka was still editing his final story collection, A Hunger Artist, which appeared soon after his death.
- Franz Kafka's name became a word in many languagesThe word Kafkaesque entered languages around the world to describe nightmarish bureaucracy, and W. H. Auden called Franz Kafka the Dante of the twentieth century.
- Franz Kafka worked to compensate injured factory workersFor most of his working life, Franz Kafka investigated and assessed compensation claims for injured industrial workers at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague.
Sources
- Franz Kafka Wikipedia
- The Metamorphosis Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.