Extract

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.

A travelling salesman wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, and his first thought is that he will be late for work. Franz Kafka wrote this novella in 1915 with the deadpan precision of a clerk filing a report on the impossible, and it is that tone, the calm narration of catastrophe, that makes the story unbearable. Gregor Samsa's family recoils, accommodates, and finally discards him, and the horror lies not in the change but in how quickly the world adjusts. The tale has been read as allegory for illness, alienation, and expendability, but it exceeds every reading because Kafka understood something prior to them all: the real terror is not becoming a monster but discovering how thin the obligation of love always was.