The Metamorphosis

New York: Bantam Books, 1986. Bantam Classic Edition [stated]. Later printing. Mass market paperback. Good. xxii, 201, [1] pages. Underlining and comments noted. Includes Introduction by Stanley Corngold; The Metamorphosis translated by Stanley Corngold; Explanatory Notes to the Text; Documents, including Letter by Franz Kafka to Max Brod; Two Conversations between Kafka and Gustav Janouch, 1920-1923; Kafka to his Father, November 1919; Entries in Kafka's Diaries; Critical Essays by Wilhelm Emrich; Ralph Freedman; Edwin Honig; Max Bense; Hellmuth Kaiser; Peter Dow Webster; Walter H. Sokol; and Friedrich Beissner. Also contains Commentary, Hellmut Richter: The Metamorphosis; and Selected Bibliography. Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 - 3 June 1924) was a Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "The Metamorphosis" and The Trial and The Castle. Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor, and individual stories (such as "The Metamorphosis") were published but received little public attention. In his will, Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, but Brod ignored these instructions. When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing, though absurdly comic, meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man. Derived from a Kirkus review: A fable, of satiric, symbolic implication, which again shows Kafka's concern with the identification of beast and man, in which "the animal is not likened to man, but man is acting out some animal identity in himself". This is the brief story of Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, who finds himself changed into a monstrous, many-legged vermin, to the horror and humiliation of his family and himself. The shame, the sorrow of his parents and sister turns to resentment -- finally results in his death. A caustic small story with a wider significance.