The Metamorphosis

In one sentence: Franz Kafka's 1915 novella (short enough to read in a sitting or two) follows traveling salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect — and the real horror isn't the shell, it's watching his own parents' and sister's love evaporate the moment he can no longer earn a wage.

Overview

Gregor wakes up transformed into a hideous giant bug, and his first concern isn't the transformation itself but the fact that he can finally skip his miserable day job. His mother knocks and begs him to get up; his office manager shows up demanding he stop faking sick; when Gregor finally opens the door, his mother faints and his father beats him back into his room with a newspaper. From then on Gregor lives under the sofa, surviving on scraps his sister Grete leaves him, while the family complains about having to support a useless bug that can no longer earn a living. His father pelts him with apples hard enough to wound him. With Gregor's income gone, the family starts taking in lodgers to make ends meet. One night Grete plays violin for the lodgers, and Gregor, drawn out by the music, crawls into view — the lodgers are horrified and refuse to pay rent unless the family gets rid of "it." Grete finally says it out loud: "It has to go." Gregor understands, crawls back under the sofa, and dies. The family is relieved, takes a trip out of the city, and starts thinking about finding Grete, now grown into a young woman, a good husband.

Why It's Recommended

This novella earns its place for how unsparingly it treats earning power as the price of admission to being treated as human: while Gregor was the one bringing in money, the rest of the family did nothing and nobody complained; the moment he can't earn, everyone else has to go to work, and somehow he's the one blamed for burdening three people. Love in this book is conditional from start to finish, and the condition is usefulness — when even your own family sees you as nothing more than a cash machine, that's a society cold enough to turn even the toughest person into an insect. The book's coldest ambiguity is left unresolved on purpose: maybe Gregor never actually transformed at all, and being dumped on day after day is what made him feel like an insect — whether the metamorphosis is metaphor or literal fact, Kafka never says. The ending is just as unsparing: in a world where everyone is putting on an act and there's no hope left, the only good thing left for Gregor to do is curl into a ball and die.

Source

Wisecrack's Thug Notes segment covers The Metamorphosis in its 2014-09-09 episode, landing on a critique of capitalism reducing people to their earning power — in the video's words: "When even yo family lookin at you like you ain't nothin more than a cash machine, you livin in a cold-ass society that can turn even the hardest hoods in to insects." The video closes on an open question: "Some scholars wonder if Gregor ACTUALLY transformed in to a bug at all. Maybe gettin dumped on day in day out just made him feel like an insect." (Originally written in German as Die Verwandlung; Kafka wrote it in 1912, and it was first published in the journal Die Weißen Blätter in 1915, one of the few works he published in his lifetime.)