Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis E-Book

Franz kafka

• Herausgeber: SK Digital Classics
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

One morning, Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Trapped in his room and unable to work, he listens as his family's initial concern turns to revulsion. Behind his locked door, he crawls the walls while his sister leaves food that grows less edible each day. As Gregor withers in his prison, his family begins to flourish without him. Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" weaves a haunting tale about identity, alienation, and the ruthless nature of family bonds. This surreal masterpiece peels away the facades of normal life to reveal the darkness that lurks beneath ordinary human relationships.

Leseprobe

Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis

A New Translation

Copyright © 2025 by Novelaris Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

ISBN: 978-3-68931-210-7

Contents

THE METAMORPHOSIS

Cover

Table of Contents

Text

THE METAMORPHOSIS

When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from restless dreams, he found himself transformed into a monstrous vermin in his bed. He lay on his hard, armored back and, when he lifted his head a little, saw his bulging, brown belly, divided by arched stiffeners, at the height of which the bedspread, ready to slide down completely, could barely hold itself. His many legs, pitifully thin in comparison to his usual girth, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

“What has happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a real human room, just a little too small, lay quietly between the four familiar walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of cloth samples was spread out - Samsa was a traveler - hung the picture he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and placed in a pretty, gilded frame. It depicted a lady wearing a fur hat and a fur boa, sitting upright and holding a heavy fur muff, in which her entire forearm had disappeared, towards the viewer.

Gregor then turned his gaze to the window, and the cloudy weather - you could hear raindrops hitting the sheet metal of the window - made him quite melancholy. “How would it be if I slept a little longer and forgot all my folly,” he thought, but that was quite impracticable, for he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side, but in his present state he could not put himself in that position. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he kept rocking back onto his back. He must have tried a hundred times, closing his eyes so as not to see his wriggling legs, and only let go when he began to feel a slight, dull pain in his side that he had never felt before.

“Oh God,” he thought, “what a strenuous job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out on the road. The business excitement is much greater than in the actual business at home, and on top of that I have this plague of traveling, the worries about train connections, the irregular, bad food, an ever-changing, never lasting, never cordial human contact. The devil take it all!” He felt a slight itch on the top of his stomach; slowly pushed himself closer to the bedpost on his back in order to be able to lift his head better; found the itchy spot, which was covered with lots of little white dots that he didn’t know how to judge; and wanted to touch the spot with one leg, but immediately withdrew it, because shivers of cold blew around him when he touched it.

He slipped back into his previous position. “This early rising,” he thought, “makes one quite stupid. A man must have his sleep. Other travelers live like harem women. For example, when I go back to the inn in the morning to sign over the orders I’ve received, these gentlemen are only sitting down to breakfast. I should try that with my boss; I would be thrown out on the spot. By the way, who knows if that wouldn’t be very good for me. If I hadn’t held back because of my parents, I would have resigned long ago, I would have stepped in front of the boss and told him what I thought from the bottom of my heart. He would have fallen off his desk! It’s also a strange way to sit on the desk and talk to the employee from a height, who also has to come very close because the boss is hard of hearing. Well, I haven’t completely given up hope yet; once I’ve got the money together to pay off his parents’ debt to him - it should take another five or six years - I’ll definitely do it. Then the big cut will be made. For now, though, I have to get up, because my train leaves at five.”

And he looked over at the alarm clock ticking on the box. “Heavenly Father!” he thought. It was half past six, and the hands were moving quietly forward, it was even half past, it was already approaching three quarters. Shouldn’t the alarm clock have rung? One could see from the bed that it was correctly set for four o’clock; it had certainly rung. Yes, but was it possible to sleep through this furniture-shaking ringing quietly? Well, he hadn’t slept soundly, but probably more soundly. But what should he do now? The next train left at seven o’clock; he would have had to hurry senselessly to catch it, and the collection was not yet packed, and he himself did not feel particularly fresh and agile. And even if he did catch up with the train, there was no avoiding the boss’s thunder, because the valet had been waiting at the five o’clock train and had long since reported his delay. It was a creature of the boss, without backbone or sense. What would happen if he called in sick? That would be extremely embarrassing and suspicious, because Gregor had never even been ill during his five years of service. The boss would certainly come with the health insurance doctor, reproach the parents for their lazy son and cut off all objections by referring to the health insurance doctor, for whom there are only healthy but work-shy people. And would he be completely wrong in this case? Gregor actually felt quite well, apart from a really superfluous drowsiness after his long sleep, and was even particularly hungry.

As he was thinking all this over in a hurry, unable to make up his mind to get out of bed - the alarm clock had just struck three-quarters of seven - there was a gentle knock on the door at the head of his bed.

“Gregor,” it called - it was the mother - “it’s three-quarters of seven. Weren’t you going to leave?” The gentle voice! Gregor was startled when he heard his answering voice, which was unmistakably his former voice, but which, as if from below, was mixed with an unsuppressible, painful squeak, which literally left the words in their clarity for the first moment only to destroy them in the aftermath so that one did not know whether one had heard correctly. Gregor had wanted to answer at length and explain everything, but in these circumstances he confined himself to saying, “Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I’ll get up.” Because of the wooden door, the change in Gregor’s voice was probably not noticeable outside, as his mother calmed down with this explanation and slipped away. But the little conversation had alerted the other family members to the fact that Gregor was still at home, contrary to expectations, and his father was already knocking on one side door, weakly but with his fist. “Gregor, Gregor,” he called out, “what is it?” And after a little while, he called out again in a lower voice: “Gregor! Gregor!” At the other side door, however, the sister complained quietly: “Gregor? Are you not feeling well? Do you need something?” Gregor replied to both sides: “I’ve already finished,” and tried to take away anything noticeable from his voice by enunciating carefully and inserting long pauses between the individual words. His father also returned to his breakfast, but his sister whispered: “Gregor, open up, I implore you.” Gregor, however, did not even think about opening the door, but praised the caution he had adopted from his travels to lock all doors at home during the night.

First he wanted to get up quietly and undisturbed, get dressed and, above all, have breakfast, and only then think about what to do next, because, as he realized, he would not be able to come to a sensible conclusion in bed. He remembered that he had often felt a slight pain in bed, perhaps caused by lying awkwardly, which turned out to be pure imagination when he got up, and he was curious to see how his present ideas would gradually dissolve. He had no doubt at all that the change in his voice was nothing more than the harbinger of a severe cold, an occupational disease of travelers.

It was very easy to throw off the blanket; he only had to puff himself up a little and it fell by itself. But it continued to be difficult, especially because he was so incredibly wide. He would have needed arms and hands to lift himself up, but instead he only had his many little legs, which were in constant motion and which he couldn’t control. If he wanted to bend one of them, it was the first to stretch; and if he finally succeeded in doing what he wanted with this leg, all the others worked in the meantime, as if released, in the highest, most painful excitement. “Only don’t stay in bed uselessly,” said Gregor to himself.

At first he wanted to get out of bed with the lower part of his body, but this lower part, which he had not yet seen and of which he had no real idea, proved to be too difficult to move; it went so slowly; and when at last, having become almost wild, he pushed himself forward with all his strength, without consideration, he had chosen the wrong direction, struck the lower bedposts violently, and the burning pain he felt taught him that the lower part of his body was perhaps the most sensitive at the moment.

He therefore tried to get his upper body out of the bed first and carefully turned his head towards the edge of the bed. He managed to do this easily, and despite its width and weight, his body slowly followed the turn of his head. But when he finally held his head outside the bed in the open air, he was afraid to continue moving forward in this way, because if he finally let himself fall like this, a miracle would have to happen if his head was not to be injured. And he could not lose his senses at any price right now; he would rather stay in bed.

But when, after the same effort, he again lay there sighing as before, and again saw his little legs struggling against each other, possibly even worse, and found no way of bringing peace and order into this arbitrariness, he told himself again that he could not possibly stay in bed, and that it was the most sensible thing to sacrifice everything if there was even the slightest hope of freeing himself from bed. At the same time, however, he did not forget to remind himself from time to time that calm and quiet reflection was much better than desperate resolutions. At such moments he fixed his eyes as keenly as possible on the window, but unfortunately there was little confidence or cheerfulness to be gained from the sight of the morning mist, which shrouded even the other side of the narrow street. “Seven o’clock already,” he said to himself as the alarm clock struck again, “seven o’clock already and still such a fog.” And for a while he lay quietly, breathing faintly, as if perhaps he expected the return of real and natural conditions from the complete silence.