It was almost certainly ‘The Metamorphosis’ that I read first, when it comes to Kafka. I’m not sure I was ready—it was more perplexing to me than anything else. Despite the striking premise, I couldn’t make out what the story was about, and it seems that was important to me at the time because I set it aside—not unimpressed, exactly, but unengaged. In the years since I’ve gone back to it many times, a different and evolved reader on each occasion with a deeper understanding of both life and literature and . . . just kidding—I still don’t know what it’s about and still very much perplexed. It’s just that, now, those are good things.
So much is glimpsed in this story—but only glimpsed. Glimpses of Gregor’s new body, glimpses of him under the sofa in the gloom at floor level where the light from the streetlamps doesn’t reach, glimpses beneath the sheet he uses to conceal himself, glimpses of his family when they leave the door open. Glimpses of a troubled self-loathing, of longstanding resentment. From the other side of a door, familial dynamics will flash in the glint of an overheard interaction. Anything more than a glimpse spells trouble: for Gregor to be in the full presence of his family, and they in his, is for something bad to happen—some escalating, uncomprehending confrontation to send him scurrying and injured.
A happy ending is delivered that costs us the protagonist. Real life, happy life, good life is only possible sans Gregor Samsa.
First published in German, as ‘Die Verwandlung’, in Die Weißen Blätter, 1915. This translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, is from Metamorphosis & Other Stories, Penguin Modern Classics, 1987
A Personal Anthology 