The Metamorphosis (original German title: Die Verwandlung) is a short novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into an insect.
The most famous of Franz Kafka's works, The Metamorphosis describes a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect. This change in his condition does not surprise or shock his family, rather, they look on it as an impending burden. Subtexts include how society's perceptions of differences, the loneliness of isolation, and the absurdity of the human condition. The Metamorphosis is often cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the...
A traveling salesman awakens from troubled slumbers to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Franz Kafka's matter-of-fact tone brings an air of absolute truth to his fantastic narrative, which chronicles the effects of this monstrous conversion upon the protagonist's business and family life. Interpretations of Kafka's acclaimed 1915 novella range from religious allegory to psychoanalytic case history. All agree upon its status as a landmark work of twentieth-century...
"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term "«Kafkaesque.» Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment — based on an undisclosed charge — in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks.Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human...
THE TRIAL is a novel written by Franz Kafka from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never completed, although...