“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning hours from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka starts his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a man who, changed overnight right into a large beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own house, a quintessentially alienated guy. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—yoga on human emotions of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis offers used its place as one of the most widely examine and influential functions of twentieth-century fiction.