'The Metamorphosis' by Franz Kafka: Alienation, Family, and the Uneasy Body
A lucid introduction to Kafka’s strange, quiet story of work, shame, dependence, and human worth
Few opening sentences in modern literature are as calmly disorienting as the beginning of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Gregor Samsa wakes one morning from uneasy dreams and finds himself transformed into a monstrous insect-like creature. Kafka offers no explanation, no mythic background, no scientific cause. The event has already happened. What matters is not how Gregor changed, but how everyone responds.
This is one reason the novella still feels so fresh. Kafka does not treat the impossible as spectacle. He places it inside a rented apartment, among bills, work obligations, locked doors, family anxieties, and breakfast routines. The strangeness of the transformation is immediately entangled with ordinary life. Gregor’s first thoughts are not about metaphysics, but about missing his train, displeasing his employer, and endangering his family’s financial security. The grotesque becomes domestic. The absurd becomes practical.
Written in 1912 and published in 1915 under the German title Die Verwandlung, the novella belongs to the unsettled landscape of early twentieth-century European literature. Kafka wrote in Prague, in German, within the complex cultural world of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. His fiction is often associated with modernism, but it does not announce itself with stylistic experimentation in the manner of some of his contemporaries. Its modernity lies elsewhere: in its atmosphere of anxiety, its distrust of stable identity, its attention to bureaucracy, guilt, estrangement, and the fragility of social belonging.
The Metamorphosis is brief, but it opens onto large questions. What makes a person recognizable as human? Is love durable when usefulness disappears? How much of family affection depends upon labor, income, obedience, or habit? Kafka never turns these questions into statements. He lets them emerge from the pressure of a situation that is at once unreal and painfully plausible.
Gregor Samsa, before his transformation, is a travelling salesman. His life is organized by duty. He works at a job he dislikes in order to pay off his parents’ debt and support the household. His days are regulated by timetables, complaints, and exhaustion. Even before he loses his human body, he has already been reduced by work to something mechanical. He has little privacy, little pleasure, and almost no sense of a future belonging to himself. His transformation makes visible a condition that was already present: he has been living as a function rather than as a person.
Kafka’s genius in the novella lies partly in this quiet reversal. Gregor’s body becomes monstrous, yet his mind remains anxious, considerate, and almost absurdly dutiful. He worries about his family. He feels shame for frightening them. He tries to hide so that his appearance will not distress his sister. He listens through walls and doors, longing to be understood. The reader is placed in an uncomfortable position: Gregor looks repulsive to others, but from within he remains tender, confused, and vulnerable. The distance between outward form and inward life becomes the moral center of the story.
The family’s reaction unfolds gradually. At first there is shock, confusion, and a kind of practical panic. Gregor’s mother is horrified but still emotionally attached to him. His father responds with anger and authority. His sister Grete initially shows the greatest care, bringing him food, observing his changed tastes, and trying to make his room more bearable. Yet even her sympathy has limits. As the days pass, Gregor becomes less a son and brother than a problem to be managed.
This slow alteration is one of the novella’s most unsettling movements. Kafka does not portray the family as simply cruel from the start. Their conduct changes under pressure: financial pressure, social embarrassment, fatigue, fear, and disgust. The household must reorganize itself. The parents and Grete begin to work. Gregor’s room becomes increasingly neglected, then used for storage. His exclusion is not only emotional but spatial. The room that once contained him as a person becomes the place where unwanted things are placed.
Grete is perhaps the most painful figure after Gregor himself. At the beginning, she appears sensitive and attentive. Her care gives Gregor brief moments of hope. He imagines helping her study music at the conservatory, a dream that reveals his own submerged tenderness and his wish to give her a better life. But Grete also grows up through his decline. She becomes more active, more practical, and finally more decisive in rejecting him. When she declares that the family must get rid of “it,” the shift is complete. Gregor has been linguistically severed from his former identity. He is no longer “he” in the full sense; he has become an obstacle to the family’s recovery.
The father’s role is more openly forceful. He embodies injured authority, resentment, and the return of patriarchal power. Before Gregor’s transformation, the father appears diminished, dependent on his son’s earnings. Afterward, he resumes a commanding position, even acquiring a uniform through his job. The uniform matters: it suggests social role, discipline, and external legitimacy. His attack on Gregor, especially the scene involving the thrown apples, is one of the novella’s most memorable images of domestic violence. The wound Gregor receives does not properly heal, and it marks the body as the place where family fear becomes punishment.
Gregor’s mother occupies a more conflicted position. She is repelled by what Gregor has become, but she cannot entirely abandon the memory of her son. Her weakness, fainting, and hesitation may frustrate a modern reader, yet they also reveal the limits of maternal feeling under conditions of horror and dependency. She loves Gregor, but not strongly enough to save him from the family’s collective movement away from him.
The novella’s central tension is not simply between Gregor and his family, but between personhood and usefulness. As long as Gregor earns money, his place in the household is secure, though emotionally impoverished. Once he can no longer work, he becomes a burden. Kafka’s story is often read as a parable of alienation, and rightly so, but the alienation is not abstract. It is economic, bodily, familial, and linguistic. Gregor loses the ability to speak intelligibly. He can understand others, but they cannot understand him. This asymmetry is devastating. He remains inwardly connected to human meanings, while outwardly excluded from human exchange.
That loss of language is central to the story’s sadness. Gregor hears conversations through doors. He interprets tones, movements, silences. He longs to explain himself, but explanation is impossible. Kafka understands isolation not merely as being alone, but as being present and unreadable. Gregor is still in the apartment, still near his family, still emotionally involved in their lives. Yet proximity does not create intimacy. He is close enough to hear them, but too altered to be heard.
Why does The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka remain relevant today? Partly because its symbolic openness allows each generation to recognize its own anxieties in it. Readers have seen in Gregor’s transformation a figure for illness, disability, depression, burnout, social shame, migration, adolescence, spiritual guilt, and the dehumanizing effects of work. None of these readings exhausts the novella. Its power lies in the fact that Gregor’s condition is both specific and undefined. Kafka gives us an image precise enough to wound, but not so fixed that it can be reduced to a single meaning.
The story also speaks with particular force in a culture still inclined to measure worth by productivity. Gregor’s fear of being late for work, even after waking in an impossible body, is darkly comic because it is so recognizable. Many readers understand the reflex: the body may be collapsing, the mind may be in distress, but the first thought is obligation. Kafka exposes the cruelty hidden inside this reflex. A life organized entirely around usefulness may leave a person with no language for need.
At the same time, the novella resists easy moral comfort. The Samsa family behaves badly, but they are not free from necessity. They are frightened, financially vulnerable, and socially trapped. Kafka does not excuse their abandonment of Gregor, but he shows how ordinary pressures can make abandonment appear reasonable. That is part of the story’s mature unease. It does not ask whether monsters exist. It asks how quickly a family, a workplace, or a society can decide that someone has become impossible to accommodate.
The ending is especially chilling because it is so calm. After Gregor’s death, the family experiences relief. They leave the apartment, take a tram into the open air, and begin to imagine a better future, especially for Grete. Life resumes. The world does not pause to mourn Gregor. This final movement is not melodramatic; it is almost serene, and for that reason more disturbing. Kafka allows us to feel both the family’s release and the cost of that release.
To read The Metamorphosis is to enter a small, enclosed space where every gesture matters: a door opening, a piece of furniture moved, a voice heard from the next room, a body struggling to turn over. Its scale is modest, but its implications are not. Kafka’s novella asks us to attend to the vulnerable boundary between being loved and being tolerated, between being seen and being classified, between having a place and merely occupying space.
For readers approaching Kafka for the first time, this is perhaps the most direct and intimate place to begin. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka is short enough to read in an evening, but it tends to linger far longer than its length would suggest. It rewards rereading because its strangeness never settles into a single explanation. One returns to it not for answers, exactly, but for the clarity with which it stages questions many people spend their lives avoiding.
A copy of the book belongs well within reach: not as a monument to literary difficulty, but as a quiet, unsettling companion for anyone interested in work, family, shame, tenderness, and the fragile conditions under which we recognize one another as human.
The Metamorphosis
Translated by Wilma Baltus. Copyright © Wilma Baltus. All rights reserved.
When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous verminous creature. He lay on his hard, armor-plated back, and when he raised his head a little, he could see his rounded brown abdomen, divided into rigid, arching segments. The bedspread perched precariously on top of it, barely keeping itself from sliding off altogether. His many legs, pitifully thin in comparison with the rest of his bulk, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
“What has happened to me?” he thought.
It was no dream. His room—a proper human bedroom, though somewhat too small—lay peacefully within its four familiar walls. Above the table, where a collection of fabric samples had been unpacked and spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung a picture he had recently cut from an illustrated magazine and placed in a handsome gilded frame. It showed a lady sitting upright, dressed in a fur hat and fur boa, holding out toward the viewer a heavy fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.
Gregor’s gaze shifted toward the window, and the gloomy weather—the sound of raindrops striking the metal sill could be heard—filled him with melancholy.
“What if I went back to sleep for a little while,” he thought, “and forgot all this nonsense?”
But that was completely impossible. He was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present condition he could not turn himself into that position. No matter how forcefully he threw himself to the right, he always rocked back onto his hard shell. He must have tried a hundred times, closing his eyes so that he would not have to see his legs flailing about, and he stopped only when he began to feel a faint, dull pain in his side, unlike anything he had ever felt before.
“Oh God,” he thought, “what an exhausting profession I’ve chosen. Traveling day in, day out. The strain of doing business on the road is far worse than working at the office itself, and on top of that there is the torment of travel—the anxiety over train connections, the irregular and miserable meals, the constant stream of human contact that never lasts long enough to become warm or sincere. To hell with all of it!”
He felt a slight itching high on his abdomen. Slowly, still lying on his back, he edged himself closer to the bedpost so that he could lift his head more easily. He found the itching place and saw that it was covered with tiny white spots whose nature he could not understand. He tried to touch the area with one of his legs, but drew it back at once, for the contact sent icy shudders through him.
He slid back into his former position.
“Getting up so early,” he thought, “makes a person completely witless. A man needs his sleep. Other traveling salesmen live like women in a harem. When I go back to the hotel during the morning, for instance, to write up the orders I’ve collected, those gentlemen are only just sitting down to breakfast. I’d like to try that with my employer. I’d be dismissed on the spot. Though who knows? Perhaps that would be the best thing that could happen to me. If I didn’t have to hold myself back for my parents’ sake, I would have resigned long ago. I would have marched straight up to the chief and told him exactly what I thought, from the bottom of my heart. He would have fallen off his desk! It’s a strange way to behave, too, sitting up there on the desk and speaking down to an employee from such a height—especially when, because the chief is hard of hearing, the employee has to come right up close to him.
“Still, I haven’t abandoned hope altogether. Once I’ve saved enough money to pay off my parents’ debt to him—it should take another five or six years—I’ll do it without fail. Then I’ll make the final break. For now, though, I have to get up. My train leaves at five.”
He looked across at the alarm clock ticking on the chest.
“Heavenly Father!” he thought.
It was half past six. The hands were moving steadily forward; in fact, it was already past the half hour and drawing close to quarter to seven. Could the alarm have failed to ring? From the bed he could see that it had been set correctly for four o’clock. Surely it must have gone off. But was it possible to sleep through that furniture-shaking clamor without stirring? Well, he had hardly slept peacefully, but perhaps that meant he had slept all the more deeply.
What was he supposed to do now? The next train left at seven. To catch it, he would have to hurry like a madman, and his samples had not even been packed. Nor did he himself feel particularly alert or agile. And even if he managed to catch the train, there would be no escaping the chief’s fury, because the office attendant would have been waiting for him at the five o’clock train and would long since have reported his absence. The man was the chief’s creature, without either backbone or sense.
What if he called in sick? But that would be intensely embarrassing and suspicious, since Gregor had not been ill once in his five years with the company. The chief would certainly come with the health-insurance doctor, reproach his parents for having such a lazy son, and silence every objection by referring to the doctor, who believed that there were no sick people at all, only perfectly healthy people unwilling to work. And, in this particular case, would he be entirely wrong? Apart from a drowsiness that seemed quite unnecessary after such a long sleep, Gregor actually felt perfectly well. He was even unusually hungry.
He was turning all this over in his mind at frantic speed, yet still could not bring himself to leave the bed, when the clock struck quarter to seven. There was a cautious knock at the door beside the head of his bed.
“Gregor,” someone called—it was his mother—“it’s quarter to seven. Weren’t you supposed to be leaving?”
That gentle voice!
Gregor was startled when he heard the voice in which he answered. It was unmistakably his old voice, and yet beneath it there was an uncontrollable, painful chirping sound, as though rising from somewhere deep below. His words remained clear only for the first instant; then the strange reverberation distorted them so completely that no one could be certain they had heard correctly. Gregor had meant to give a full answer and explain everything, but under the circumstances he confined himself to saying, “Yes, yes. Thank you, Mother. I’m getting up now.”
The wooden door must have muffled the change in Gregor’s voice, because his mother seemed reassured by this reply and shuffled away. But the brief exchange had alerted the other members of the family to the fact that, contrary to all expectation, Gregor was still at home. Almost at once his father knocked at one of the side doors—not loudly, but with his fist.
“Gregor, Gregor,” he called. “What’s the matter?”
After a moment he urged him again, this time in a deeper voice.
“Gregor! Gregor!”
At the other side door, his sister spoke in a low, anxious voice.
“Gregor? Are you unwell? Do you need anything?”
“I’m nearly ready,” Gregor answered in both directions, trying through the most careful pronunciation and long pauses between individual words to remove anything unusual from his voice.
His father returned to his breakfast, but his sister whispered, “Gregor, open the door. I’m begging you.”
Gregor, however, had no intention of opening it. Instead, he congratulated himself on the habit he had acquired while traveling of locking every door at night, even at home.
First, he wanted to get up quietly and without interruption, dress himself, and above all have breakfast. Only then would he consider what to do next. He understood perfectly well that he would never arrive at any sensible conclusion while lying in bed. He remembered often having felt some slight pain while in bed, perhaps caused by lying awkwardly, which had proved, once he got up, to be nothing more than his imagination. He was curious to see how gradually the strange impressions of this morning would dissolve. He had no doubt at all that the change in his voice was merely the first sign of a serious cold, an occupational illness among traveling salesmen.
Throwing off the bedspread was easy enough. He had only to swell his body a little, and it slipped away by itself. Beyond that, however, everything became difficult, especially because he was so extraordinarily broad. He would have needed arms and hands to push himself upright. Instead, he had only those many little legs, which moved continuously in all sorts of different directions and which, moreover, he could not control. Whenever he tried to bend one of them, its first response was to stretch itself straight. And if at last he succeeded in making that particular leg do what he wanted, all the others meanwhile thrashed about as though suddenly set free, in a state of the most intense and painful agitation.
“There’s no sense in wasting time in bed,” Gregor told himself.
At first he tried to get the lower half of his body out of bed. But this lower half—which he had not yet seen and could not properly imagine—proved extremely difficult to move. His progress was painfully slow. Finally, almost beside himself, he gathered all his strength and thrust forward recklessly. But he had chosen the wrong direction and struck the lower bedpost with tremendous force. The burning pain that shot through him taught him that, for the moment at least, the lower part of his body was perhaps the most sensitive.
He therefore tried to get the upper half of his body out of bed first, carefully turning his head toward the edge. This proved easy enough, and despite its breadth and weight, the rest of his body slowly followed the movement of his head. But when at last his head hung beyond the bed, suspended in the open air, he became afraid to continue in this way. If he finally allowed himself to fall, it would take a miracle to keep his head from being injured. And now, of all times, he could not afford to lose consciousness. He would rather remain in bed.
But when, after the same exhausting effort, he lay there once more in his former position, sighing, and saw his little legs struggling against one another with even greater violence, while he could find no way of bringing peace or order to their lawless movements, he told himself again that staying in bed was impossible. The most sensible course would be to risk everything, provided there was even the faintest hope of freeing himself. At the same time, he did not forget to remind himself that calm—indeed, the calmest possible—reflection was always better than desperate decisions.
At such moments he fixed his eyes as sharply as he could on the window. Unfortunately, the morning fog, which concealed even the opposite side of the narrow street, offered little encouragement or cheer.
“Seven o’clock already,” he told himself as the alarm clock struck again. “Seven o’clock, and still this fog.”
For a little while he lay still, breathing faintly, as though he expected the absolute silence to restore the real and natural order of things.
Then he said to himself, “Before quarter past seven strikes, I absolutely must be completely out of bed. Besides, by then someone from the office will come to ask about me. They open before seven.”
He now began rocking the entire length of his body out of bed in one steady movement. If he let himself fall in this way, his head would probably remain unhurt, provided he lifted it sharply at the moment of impact. His back seemed hard enough; surely the fall onto the carpet would do it no harm. His greatest concern was the loud crash the fall would inevitably cause, a sound that would probably provoke, behind every door, if not terror, then at least alarm. Still, he would have to risk it.
When Gregor was already hanging halfway out of bed—the new method was more like a game than an effort, since all he had to do was rock himself forward in a series of jerks—it occurred to him how simple everything would be if someone came to help. Two strong people—he thought of his father and the maid—would have been entirely sufficient. They would only have had to slide their arms beneath his rounded back, peel him out of the bed, bend beneath his weight, and then carefully allow him to complete the rolling movement onto the floor, where, he hoped, his little legs would finally discover their purpose.
But even apart from the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call for help? Despite his distress, he could not suppress a smile at the thought.
By now he had rocked so far over the edge that the slightest stronger movement would make him lose his balance, and very soon he would have to commit himself, for it was five minutes to quarter past seven—when the doorbell rang at the entrance to the apartment.
“That’s someone from the office,” he told himself.
He went almost rigid, while his little legs danced all the more frantically.
For a moment everything remained silent.
“They aren’t going to open the door,” Gregor thought, clinging to some absurd hope.
But then, of course, as always, the maid walked firmly to the door and opened it. Gregor needed to hear only the visitor’s first word of greeting to know who it was: the chief clerk himself.
Why was Gregor condemned to work for a company where the slightest lapse immediately aroused the gravest suspicion? Were all the employees, every last one of them, assumed to be scoundrels? Was there not among them a single loyal and devoted man who, after failing to make use of a few morning hours for the company, might be driven nearly mad by guilt and become quite literally incapable of leaving his bed?
Would it not have been enough to send an apprentice to make inquiries—assuming any inquiry was necessary at all? Did the chief clerk himself really have to come? And did the entire innocent family have to be shown, in this way, that the investigation of so suspicious a matter could be entrusted only to the chief clerk’s intelligence?
More from the agitation these thoughts had stirred in him than from any firm decision, Gregor swung himself out of bed with all his strength.
There was a loud thud, though not exactly a crash. The carpet softened the fall somewhat, and his back proved more flexible than Gregor had expected, so the resulting sound was dull and not especially conspicuous. Only his head had not been held carefully enough. He had struck it, and now he turned it from side to side, rubbing it against the carpet in anger and pain.
“Something fell in there,” the chief clerk said in the room to the left.
Gregor tried to imagine whether something like what had happened to him that morning might not one day happen to the chief clerk as well. Surely the possibility had to be admitted. But as though offering a blunt answer to the question, the chief clerk now took several firm steps in the next room, making his patent-leather boots creak.
From the room on the right, Gregor’s sister whispered to let him know, “Gregor, the chief clerk is here.”
“I know,” Gregor said under his breath, but he did not dare raise his voice loudly enough for her to hear.
“Gregor,” his father now called from the room to the left, “the chief clerk has come and wants to know why you didn’t leave on the early train. We don’t know what to tell him. Besides, he wants to speak to you in person. So please open the door. I’m sure he will be kind enough to excuse the disorder in your room.”
“Good morning, Mr. Samsa,” the chief clerk called out pleasantly.
“He isn’t well,” Gregor’s mother said to the chief clerk while his father was still speaking at the door. “He isn’t well, believe me, sir. Why else would Gregor miss a train? The boy thinks of nothing but business. I almost resent the fact that he never goes out in the evenings. He’s been in the city for eight days now, and every evening he has stayed at home. He sits with us at the table and quietly reads the newspaper or studies railway timetables. It counts as a diversion for him when he does a little fretwork. Over the course of two or three evenings, for instance, he carved a small frame. You’ll be astonished by how lovely it is. It’s hanging inside his room; you’ll see it as soon as Gregor opens the door. In any case, I’m very glad you’re here. We would never have managed to persuade Gregor to open the door by ourselves. He can be so stubborn. And he is certainly unwell, despite denying it this morning.”
“I’m coming at once,” Gregor said slowly and deliberately, remaining perfectly still so that he would not miss a word of the conversation.
“I can see no other explanation myself, madam,” said the chief clerk. “Let us hope it is nothing serious. Though I must also say that we men of business—whether fortunately or unfortunately depends on one’s point of view—are very often obliged, for professional reasons, simply to overcome a slight indisposition.”
“So may the chief clerk come in now?” his impatient father asked, knocking once more on the door.
“No,” said Gregor.
An oppressive silence descended in the room to the left. In the room to the right, his sister began to sob.
Why had she not joined the others? She had probably only just got out of bed and had not yet even begun to dress. And why was she crying? Because he would not get up or let the chief clerk in? Because he was in danger of losing his position, after which the chief would begin pursuing his parents again over their old debts?
Surely those fears were premature. Gregor was still here and had not the slightest intention of abandoning his family. At that moment, admittedly, he was lying on the carpet, and no one who knew what condition he was in could seriously have expected him to admit the chief clerk. But he could hardly be dismissed at once over such a minor discourtesy, for which a suitable excuse could easily be found later. It seemed far more sensible to Gregor that they should leave him in peace instead of disturbing him with tears and pleading. But it was uncertainty that tormented the others, and that uncertainty excused their behavior.
“Mr. Samsa,” the chief clerk now called in a raised voice, “what is going on? You barricade yourself inside your room, answer us with nothing but yes and no, cause your parents grave and entirely unnecessary anxiety, and neglect—though I mention this only in passing—your professional duties in a manner that is frankly unheard of. I am speaking here on behalf of both your parents and your employer, and I must insist, with the utmost seriousness, on an immediate and unambiguous explanation.
“I am astonished, truly astonished. I believed you to be a quiet, sensible man, and now you suddenly appear determined to parade a series of peculiar whims before us. This morning the chief did suggest one possible explanation for your failure to appear. It concerned the collections that were recently entrusted to you. But I virtually pledged my honor that such an explanation could not possibly be true.
“Now, however, after witnessing this incomprehensible obstinacy, I have lost all desire to defend you in even the smallest degree. And your position is by no means secure. I originally intended to tell you all this in private, but since you are forcing me to waste my time here for no purpose, I see no reason why your parents should not hear it as well.
“Your performance recently has been extremely unsatisfactory. Admittedly, this is not the season in which one can expect exceptional business. We recognize that. But there is no season in which one may conduct no business at all, Mr. Samsa. There must never be such a season.”
“But sir!” Gregor cried, beside himself, forgetting everything else in his agitation. “I’ll open the door at once—this very moment. A slight illness, a sudden dizzy spell, prevented me from getting up. I’m still lying in bed now. But I already feel completely refreshed. I’m getting out of bed this instant. Just give me one small moment! It isn’t going quite as easily as I expected. But I feel well again already.
“How suddenly such a thing can overwhelm a person! Only last night I felt perfectly well—my parents can confirm it. Or rather, even last night I had a slight premonition. Someone ought to have been able to see it in me. Why didn’t I report it to the office? But one always imagines one can get through an illness without having to stay at home.
“Please, sir, spare my parents. There is no reason for any of the accusations you have just made. No one has said a word to me about any of this. Perhaps you haven’t read the latest orders I sent in. In any case, I’ll leave on the eight o’clock train. These few hours of rest have restored my strength. Please don’t let me keep you. I’ll be at the office myself very shortly, and please be kind enough to tell the chief so and put in a good word for me.”
While Gregor poured all this out in a rush, scarcely knowing what he was saying, he had—perhaps because of the practice he had already gained in bed—managed to move fairly easily toward the chest and was now trying to pull himself upright against it. He truly meant to open the door, to let himself be seen and speak with the chief clerk. He was eager to discover what the others, who were now so insistently demanding his presence, would say when they saw him. If they were horrified, then Gregor would no longer bear any responsibility and could remain calm. But if they accepted everything quietly, then he too would have no reason to become agitated and, provided he hurried, might actually be at the station by eight o’clock.
At first he slipped several times from the smooth surface of the chest. But at last he gave himself one final heave and stood upright. He no longer paid the slightest attention to the pain in his lower body, though it burned fiercely. Then he let himself fall against the back of a nearby chair and gripped its edges with his little legs. In this position he regained control of himself and fell silent, for now he could listen to the chief clerk.
“Did you understand a single word of that?” the chief clerk asked Gregor’s parents. “Surely he isn’t trying to make fools of us?”
“For God’s sake,” his mother cried, already in tears, “perhaps he is seriously ill, and we are tormenting him. Grete! Grete!” she called.
“Mother?” his sister answered from the other side.
They were speaking to each other through Gregor’s room.
“You must go for the doctor at once. Gregor is ill. Quickly, fetch the doctor. Did you hear Gregor speaking just now?”
“That was the voice of an animal,” said the chief clerk, strikingly softly beside the mother’s cries.
“Anna! Anna!” Gregor’s father called through the hall toward the kitchen, clapping his hands. “Fetch a locksmith immediately!”
The two young women were already hurrying through the hall, their skirts rustling—how had his sister managed to dress so quickly?—and flung open the front door. Gregor did not hear it close behind them. They must have left it standing open, as doors so often are in homes where some great disaster has occurred.
Gregor, however, had grown much calmer. So his words could no longer be understood, even though they had seemed clear enough to him—clearer than before, perhaps because his ears were becoming accustomed to their sound. But at least the others now believed that something was genuinely wrong with him and were prepared to help. The confidence and decisiveness with which the first orders had been given comforted him. He felt himself drawn back into the human circle, and he expected extraordinary, astonishing feats from both the doctor and the locksmith, though in his mind he scarcely distinguished between the two.
In order to make his voice as clear as possible for the decisive conversations that were approaching, he cleared his throat with a small cough, taking care to muffle it, since even this sound might no longer resemble a human cough—and he no longer trusted himself to judge. Meanwhile, the next room had fallen completely silent. Perhaps his parents and the chief clerk were sitting at the table whispering together; perhaps they were all leaning against the door, listening.
Gregor slowly pushed himself and the chair toward the door. Once there, he released it, threw himself against the door, and held himself upright against its surface—the pads of his little legs possessed a slight adhesive quality. He rested there for a moment after the effort. Then he began trying to turn the key in the lock with his mouth.
Unfortunately, it seemed that he had no proper teeth—with what, then, was he supposed to grasp the key? But his jaws were certainly very strong, and with their help he did manage to set the key in motion. He paid no attention to the fact that he was undoubtedly injuring himself, for a brown liquid began to flow from his mouth, ran over the key, and dripped onto the floor.
“Just listen,” said the chief clerk in the next room. “He’s turning the key.”
This was a great encouragement to Gregor. But they should all have called out to him, his father and mother too.
“Come on, Gregor!” they should have cried. “Keep going! Press hard against the lock!”
Imagining that they were all following his efforts with breathless attention, he clamped his jaws around the key with every ounce of strength he possessed, almost senseless with exertion. As the key gradually turned, he danced around the lock. By now he was holding himself upright only by his mouth, hanging from the key when necessary and then pressing it downward again with the full weight of his body.
The sharper click of the lock finally springing open seemed to awaken him.
Breathing with relief, he told himself, “So I didn’t need the locksmith after all.”
Then he laid his head against the handle to push the door fully open.
Because he had been forced to open it in this way, the door was already quite wide before he himself could be seen. First he had to turn slowly around its edge, and he had to do so with the greatest care unless he wanted to fall clumsily onto his back just before entering the room.
He was still occupied with this difficult maneuver and had no time to notice anything else when he heard the chief clerk utter a loud “Oh!”—a sound like wind rushing through a hollow space.