"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 inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, "The
Metamorphosis" has taken its place as one of the mosst 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."