Samsa’s reaction from this point on is packed with symbolic meaning. Instead, he refers to his own new form as “nonsense,” and immediately tries with all his might to get himself out of bed so that he can start his day, as though it were like any other. Samsa’s reaction is not one of shock or horror. Samsa’s shivering discovery of his new, grotesque self-“his armor-like back,” “his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections,” and “his many legs, pitifully thin” (7). The narrator continues on to describe to describe Mr.

Samsa dreaming? Is the mysterious narrator speaking figuratively? As we read on, we learn that no, Mr. What is meant by “vermin,” one wonders? Is Mr. This first sentence puzzles the reader, as one is not yet sure what to think. The story’s protagonist, Gregor Samsa, has awoken one morning to find himself “transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin” (7). The novella opens with a most preposterous scenario, immediately testing, and seeking to expand, the reader’s ability to suspend disbelief. As this short essay will explore, the reader leaves the novel feeling unsettled and unsatisfied, imprinted-one might even say scarred-with the message that sometimes the world one lives in makes it impossible to ever express that identity and to have it understood.

Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a magical realist, allegorical tale that touches on the theme most central to us all-that of struggling to find and express one’s own identity in a world of ever-present, all-consuming obligations. Ominously, the cover does not contain an image of Gregor Samsa in his transformed state-the nature of his new form is left entirely up to the reader. The original cover of Kafka's Metamorphosis, as the author intended it.

Kafka the metamorphosis