The Metamorphosis (German: Die Verwandlung, pronounced [dɪ fɛɐ̯ˈvantlʊŋ]), also translated as The Transformation, is a novella by Franz Kafka published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, The Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect (German: ungeheueres Ungeziefer, lit. 'monstrous vermin') and struggles to adjust to this condition, as does his family. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, who have offered varied interpretations. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.
At about 70 printed pages, it is the longest of the stories Kafka considered complete and published during his lifetime. It was first published in 1915 in the October issue of the journal Die weißen Blätter under the editorship of René Schickele. The first edition in book form appeared in December 1915 in the series Der jüngste Tag, edited by Kurt Wolff.
Contents
Plot
Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin". He initially considers the transformation to be temporary and slowly ponders the consequences of his metamorphosis. Stuck on his back and unable to get up and leave the bed, Gregor reflects on his job as a traveling salesman and cloth merchant, which he characterizes as being "plagued with ... the always changing, never enduring human exchanges that don't ever become intimate".
He sees his employer as a despot and would quickly quit his job if he were not his family's sole breadwinner and working off his bankrupt father's debts. While trying to move, Gregor finds that his office manager, the chief clerk, has shown up to check on him, indignant about Gregor's unexcused absence.
Gregor attempts to communicate with both the manager and his family, but all they can hear from behind the door is incomprehensible vocalizations. Gregor laboriously drags himself across the floor and opens the door. The clerk, upon seeing the transformed Gregor, flees the apartment. Gregor's family is horrified, and his father drives him back towards his room. Gregor is injured when he tries to force himself through the narrow doorway but gets unstuck when his father shoves him through.
With Gregor's unexpected transformation, his family is deprived of financial stability. They keep Gregor locked in his room, and he begins to accept his new identity and adapt to his new body. His sister Grete is the only one willing to bring him food, which she finds Gregor likes only if it is rotten. He spends much of his time crawling around on the floor, walls, and ceiling.
Upon discovering Gregor's new pastime, Grete decides to remove his furniture to give him more space. She and her mother begin to empty the room of everything, except the sofa under which Gregor hides whenever anyone comes in. He finds their actions deeply distressing, fearing that he might forget his past as a human, and desperately tries to save a particularly loved portrait on the wall of a woman clad in fur. His mother loses consciousness at the sight of him clinging to the image to protect it.
When Grete rushes out of the room to get some aromatic spirits, Gregor follows her and is slightly hurt when she drops a medicine bottle and it breaks. Their father returns home and angrily hurls apples at Gregor, one of which becomes lodged in his back, severely wounding him.
Characters
Gregor Samsa
Gregor is the main character of the story. He works as a traveling salesman in order to provide money for his sister and parents, including paying off debt his father had accumulated. He wakes up one morning finding himself transformed into an insect. After the metamorphosis, Gregor becomes unable to work and is confined to his room for most of the remainder of the story. This prompts his family to begin working once again. Gregor is depicted as isolated from society and often both misunderstands the true intentions of others and is misunderstood.
Grete Samsa
Grete is Gregor's younger sister, and she becomes his caretaker after his metamorphosis. They initially have a close relationship, but this quickly fades. At first, she volunteers to feed him and clean his room, but she grows increasingly impatient with the burden and begins to leave his room in disarray out of spite. Her initial decision to take care of Gregor may have come from a desire to contribute and be useful to the family, since she becomes angry and upset when the mother cleans his room. It is made clear that Grete is disgusted by Gregor, as she always opens the window upon entering his room to keep from feeling nauseous and leaves without doing anything if Gregor is in plain sight. She plays the violin and dreams of going to the conservatory to study, a dream Gregor had intended to make happen; he had planned on making the announcement on Christmas Day. To help provide an income for the family after Gregor's transformation, she starts working as a salesgirl. Grete is also the first to suggest getting rid of Gregor, which causes Gregor to give up on life and die. At the end of the story, Grete's parents realize that she has become beautiful and full-figured and decide to consider finding her a husband.
Mr. Samsa
Mr. Samsa is Gregor's father. After the metamorphosis, he is forced to return to work in order to support the family financially. His attitude towards his son is harsh. He regards the transformed Gregor with disgust and possibly even fear and attacks Gregor on several occasions. Even when Gregor was human, Mr. Samsa regarded him mostly as a source of income for the family. Gregor's relationship with his father is modelled after Kafka's own relationship with his father. The theme of alienation becomes quite evident here.
Mrs. Samsa
Mrs. Samsa is Gregor's mother. She is portrayed as a submissive wife. She suffers from asthma, which is a constant source of concern for Gregor. She is initially shocked at Gregor's transformation, but she still wants to enter his room because she loves him. However, it proves too much for her and gives rise to a conflict between her maternal impulse and sympathy, on the one hand, and her fear and revulsion at Gregor's new form, on the other.
The Charwoman
The charwoman is an old widowed lady who is employed by the Samsa family after their previous maid begs to be dismissed on account of the fright she experiences owing to Gregor's new form. She is paid to take care of their household duties. Apart from Grete and her father, the charwoman is the only person who is in close contact with Gregor, and she is unafraid in her dealings with Gregor. She does not question his changed state; she seemingly accepts it as a normal part of his existence. She is the one who notices Gregor has died and disposes of his body.
Interpretations
Like much of Kafka's work, The Metamorphosis tends to be given a religious (Max Brod) or psychological interpretation. It has been particularly common to read the story as an expression of Kafka's father complex, as was first done by Charles Neider in his The Frozen Sea: A Study of Franz Kafka (1948). Besides the psychological approach, interpretations focusing on sociological aspects, which see the Samsa family as representing a typical family of the time and place, have also gained a large following.
Vladimir Nabokov rejected such interpretations, noting that they do not live up to Kafka's art. He instead chose an interpretation guided by the artistic detail but excluded any symbolic or allegoric meanings. Arguing against the popular father-complex theory, he observed that it is the sister more than the father who should be considered the cruelest person in the story, since she is the one backstabbing Gregor. In Nabokov's view, the central narrative theme is the artist's struggle for existence in a society replete with narrow-minded people who destroy him step by step. Commenting on Kafka's style, he writes, "The transparency of his style underlines the dark richness of his fantasy world. Contrast and uniformity, style and the depicted, portrayal and fable are seamlessly intertwined".
In 1989, Nina Pelikan Straus wrote a feminist interpretation of The Metamorphosis, noting that the story is not only about the metamorphosis of Gregor but also about the metamorphosis of his family and, in particular, his younger sister Grete. Straus suggested that the social and psychoanalytic resonances of the text depend on Grete's role as a woman, daughter, and sister, and that prior interpretations failed to recognize Grete's centrality to the story.
In 1999, Gerhard Rieck pointed out that Gregor and his sister, Grete, form a pair, which is typical of many of Kafka's texts: it is made up of one passive, rather austere, person and another active, more libidinal, person. The appearance of figures with such almost irreconcilable personalities who form couples in Kafka's works has been evident since he wrote his short story "Description of a Struggle" (e.g. the narrator/young man and his "acquaintance"). They also appear in "The Judgment" (Georg and his friend in Russia), in all three of his novels (e.g. Robinson and Delamarche in Amerika) as well as in his short stories "A Country Doctor" (the country doctor and the groom) and "A Hunger Artist" (the hunger artist and the panther). Rieck views these pairs as parts of one single person (hence the similarity between the names Gregor and Grete) and in the final analysis as the two determining components of the author's personality. Not only in Kafka's life but also in his oeuvre does Rieck see the description of a fight between these two parts.
Translations of ungeheueren Ungeziefer in the opening sentence
The Metamorphosis has been translated into English more than twenty times. In Kafka's original, the opening sentence is "Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt". In their 1933 translation of the story – the first into English – Willa Muir and Edwin Muir rendered it as "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect". In Middle High German, Ungeziefer literally means "unclean animal not suitable for sacrifice" and is sometimes used colloquially to mean "bug", with the connotation of "dirty, nasty bug". It can also be translated as "vermin".
In a note in his translation of the story, Mark Harman writes: The compact phrase, "ungeheueres Ungeziefer, with its resonant double "un," defies translation and makes it hard to determine precisely what kind of creature Gregor has become. The possible meanings of ungeheuer—the opposite of geheuer (familiar)—range from "monstrous" to "huge." Etymologically complex, Ungeziefer could denote a number of small verminous creatures that can be either mammals or insects. While the indeterminacy of this term seems quite deliberate, Kafka is somewhat more precise in an April 1913 letter to Kurt Wolff in which he calls Gregor Samsa an "insect" (Insekt).
The phrase ungeheueren Ungeziefer, describing the creature into which Gregor Samsa transforms, has been translated in at least sixteen different ways. These include the following:
"gigantic insect" (Willa and Edwin Muir, 1933)
"some monstrous kind of vermin" (A. L. Lloyd, London: The Parton Press, 1937; New York: The Vanguard Press, as Metamorphosis, 1946)
"monstrous vermin" (Stanley Corngold, 1972; Joachim Neugroschel, 1993; Donna Freed, 1996)
"giant bug" (J. A. Underwood, 1981)
"monstrous insect" (Malcolm Pasley, 1992; Karen Reppin, 1996; Richard Stokes, 2002; Katja Pelzer, 2017; Mark Harman, 2024)
Translations of other passages
Paul Reitter, a professor of German Languages and Literature, compares three translations of a passage early in the novella, after Gregor awakes and wonders why he did not hear his alarm clock: the Muirs', Susan Bernofsky's, and Mark Harman's.
Translation of the title
The Translation Website states: The German title, Die Verwandlung, can be translated as either The Transformation or The Metamorphosis. The most frequent choice is metamorphosis, but this word has the disadvantage of being more "literary" and less commonly used in English than verwandlung is in German. The appearance of this word in the title perhaps too quickly alerts the reader to the strangeness of the story to follow; it doesn't really fit with the much more "ordinary" tone in which the story is narrated. Another problem is that those readers familiar with the word may know it primarily as a biological term referring to a caterpillar's transformation into a butterfly, not at all the type of transformation that the story describes. But despite these disadvantages, most contemporary translations use The Metamorphosis as the title of the story — mainly because it's the title that was most often used in earlier translations and therefore the one most familiar to English-language readers.
Mark Harman explains why he chose the title The Transformation for his translation of the story: Although that story is commonly known as "The Metamorphosis," Kafka, who had as a schoolboy not only read Ovid's Metamorphoses, that classic tale of "forms changed into new bodies," but also translated a portion of it from the Latin, could have entitled his story Die Metamorphose, but he did not do so. His decision to call the story "Die Verwandlung" certainly deserves to be respected in translation....
Although M. A. Roberts titled his 2005 translation The Metamorphosis, he notes that "Kafka's title actually translates as The Transformation".
In the afterword to her translation, Susan Bernofsky defends her choice of The Metamorphosis for the title: Unlike the English "metamorphosis," the German word Verwandlung does not suggest a natural change of state associated with the animal kingdom such as the change from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Instead, it is a word from fairytales used to describe the transformation, say, of a girl's seven brothers into swans. But the word "metamorphosis" refers to this, too; its first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary is "The action or process of changing in form, shape, or substance; esp. transformation by supernatural means." This is the sense in which it's used, for instance, in translations of Ovid. As a title for this rich, complex story, it strikes me as the most luminous, suggestive choice.