The Metamorphosis with Related Readings

by Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Saroyan

Contents

THE METAMORPHOSIS
In this startling and powerful novella, a man awakes to find himself transformed into an insect.
novella by Franz Kafka

Related Readings
from LETTER TO HIS FATHER
letter by Franz Kafka

from LETTERS TO FELICE
personal writings by Franz Kafka

DURATION OF CHILDHOOD and PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A YOUNG MAN
poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

GASTON
short story by William Saroyan

from NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND
excerpt from the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

Franz Kafka's family belonged to the German-speaking minority in Czechoslovakia. Kafka's family was tight-knit, and he felt pressured by his father to go into business. Kafka was successful in his career as an executive with an insurance company, but he was devoted to literature and spent all his free time working on stories and novels. An invalid for most of his life, Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of forty. Although he was infrequently published during his own lifetime, today Kafka is celebrated as a writer of worldwide importance.

72 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka grew up amid German, Czech, and Jewish cultural influences that shaped his sense of displacement and linguistic precision. His difficult relationship with his authoritarian father left a lasting mark, fostering feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inadequacy that became central themes in his fiction and personal writings.
Kafka studied law at the German University in Prague, earning a doctorate in 1906. He chose law for practical reasons rather than personal inclination, a compromise that troubled him throughout his life. After university, he worked for several insurance institutions, most notably the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties included assessing industrial accidents and drafting legal reports, work he carried out competently and responsibly. Nevertheless, Kafka regarded his professional life as an obstacle to his true vocation, and most of his writing was done at night or during periods of illness and leave. Kafka began publishing short prose pieces in his early adulthood, later collected in volumes such as Contemplation and A Country Doctor. These works attracted little attention at the time but already displayed the hallmarks of his mature style, including precise language, emotional restraint, and the application of calm logic to deeply unsettling situations. His major novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were left unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. They depict protagonists trapped within opaque systems of authority, facing accusations, rules, or hierarchies that remain unexplained and unreachable. Themes of alienation, guilt, bureaucracy, law, and punishment run throughout Kafka’s work. His characters often respond to absurd or terrifying circumstances with obedience or resignation, reflecting his own conflicted relationship with authority and obligation. Kafka’s prose avoids overt symbolism, yet his narratives function as powerful metaphors through structure, repetition, and tone. Ordinary environments gradually become nightmarish without losing their internal coherence. Kafka’s personal life was marked by emotional conflict, chronic self-doubt, and recurring illness. He formed intense but troubled romantic relationships, including engagements that he repeatedly broke off, fearing that marriage would interfere with his writing. His extensive correspondence and diaries reveal a relentless self-critic, deeply concerned with morality, spirituality, and the demands of artistic integrity. In his later years, Kafka’s health deteriorated due to tuberculosis, forcing him to withdraw from work and spend long periods in sanatoriums. Despite his illness, he continued writing when possible. He died young, leaving behind a large body of unpublished manuscripts. Before his death, he instructed his close friend Max Brod to destroy all of his remaining work. Brod ignored this request and instead edited and published Kafka’s novels, stories, and diaries, ensuring his posthumous reputation.
The publication of Kafka’s work after his death established him as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The term Kafkaesque entered common usage to describe situations marked by oppressive bureaucracy, absurd logic, and existential anxiety. His writing has been interpreted through existential, religious, psychological, and political perspectives, though Kafka himself resisted definitive meanings. His enduring power lies in his ability to articulate modern anxiety with clarity and restraint.

Reviews

[Ryry (SCHOOLLLL) · Rating 3 out of 5]

𝜗𝜚 ࣪˖ ✧˚.⋆3.5 🪳

Man wakes up and is now a cockroach (?)

I wonder how this will go…😒

Gregor and the whole family was weird af. I know this was probably some deep message or something but I can’t help but take it at face value. Wow, he’s now a cockroach (?) that is so so so so miserable. I wonder how he’ll experience this. Wait… why is he so chill? He was as chill as the dude from the Stranger (that guy killed someone, went to prison, got the death penalty, and was still so nonchalant about it). Lol.

I know Franz Kafka said he’s not a cockroach but ong everything that describes him is a cockroach.

🪳🪳🪳🪳🪳🪳🪳

[LeeAnn · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Getting up so early all the time," he thought, "makes you totally stupid."