“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found
himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this startling,
bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece,
“The Metamorphosis.” It is the story of a young man who, transformed
overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his
family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man.
A harrowing – though absurdly comic – meditation on human feelings of
inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, “The Metamorphosis” has taken its place as
one of the mosst widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.
As W.H. Auden wrote, “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the
predicament of modern man.”
Author Biography
Franz Kafka was born in 1833 to a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family. His
father, the self-made proprietor of a wholesale haberdashery business, was a
domineering man whose approbation Franz continually struggled to win. The
younger Kafka's feelings of inadequacy and guilt form the background of much of
his work and are made explicit in his “Letter to His Father” (excerpted in
this volume), which was written in 1919 but never sent. Kafka was educated in
the German language schools of Prague and at the city's German University,
where in 1908 he took a law degree. Literature, however, remained his sole
passion. At this time he became part of a literary circle that included Franz
Werfel, Martin Buber, and Kafka's close friend Max Brod. Encouraged by Brod,
Kafka published the prose collection Observations in 1913. Two years later his
story “The Stoker” won the Fontaine prize. In 1916 he began work on The
Trial and between this time and 1923 produced three incomplete novels as well
as numerous sketches and stories. In his lifetime some of his short works did
appear: The Judgment (1916), The Metamorphosis (1916), The Penal Colony (1919),
and The Country Doctor (1919). Before his death of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka
had charged Max Brod with the execution of his estate, ordering Brod to burn the
manuscripts. With the somewhat circular justification that Kafka must have known
his friend could not obey such an order, Brod decided to publish
Kafka's writings. To this act of “betrayal” the world owes the preservation
of some of the most unforgettable and influential literary works of our
century.
