The Metamorphosis ebook i audiobook

Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis

New translation of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Poor Gregor Samsa! This guy wakes up one morning to discover that he's become a "monstrous vermin".

The first pages of The Metamorphosis where Gregor tries to communicate through the bedroom door with his family, who think he’s merely being lazy, is vintage screwball comedy. Indeed, scholars and readers alike have delighted in Kafka’s gallows humor and matter-of-fact handling of the absurd and the terrifying.

But it is one of the most enigmatic stories of all time, with an opening sentence that’s unparalleled in all of literature.

Upon waking up after a troublesome dream one morning, Gregor Zamza realized that he had turned into a hideous insect. Lying on a hard shell that was now his back, he saw, with a mere move of his head, his brown, bulgy, scaly stomach, on top of which lied a blanket that was clearly about to fall down. His numerous, pathetically thin, compared to the rest of his body, legs floundered helplessly in front of his eyes.

  “What has happened to me?”, he thought. This was not a dream. His room, real, though too cramped, yet still ordinary, quietly resided within the familiar walls. Above the table, covered with an assortment of unpacked clothes (Zamza was a travelling salesman) hung a portrait which he recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and put in a beautiful gilded frame. The portrait featured a woman in a fur hat and a boa; she was sitting straight extending a heavy fur glove, which almost absorbed her hand, towards the viewer.

  Then Gregor’s gaze turned to the window, and the dull weather - the raindrops banging against the metallic surface of the windowsill could be heard - made his mood even worse. “It would be nice to sleep a little longer and forget this nonsense”, he thought. Yet it was absolutely impossible, since he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side, and, in his new form, there was no way he could resort to that position. No matter how hard he tried to turn to his right side, he would still fall invariably on his back. After closing his eyes in an attempt to ignore his floundering legs, he tried to repeat it about a hundred more times and had to abandon these attempts only because he became aware of a previously unknown dull and mild pain in the right side of his body.

  “Oh my God”, he thought, “what a tedious profession I’ve chosen! Day after day I travel around. There is more to worry about compared to when you stay at the same place, the shopping center. Besides, you have to endure the hardships of life on the road, bother yourself with the train schedules, accept your irregular and unhealthy eating patterns and engage in a multitude of fleeting, and never heartfelt, relationships. To hell with it all!” He felt a slight itch in his upper stomach and slowly moved closer to the bed twigs to make it easier to raise his head; he was about to touch the spot with one of his legs, yet instantly pulled it back since even a mere touch sent a chill through his body.

  He slid back into his former position. “Such an early awakening”, he thought, “can make you go insane. One should get enough sleep. Other salesmen live like a bunch of odalisques. For instance, when I return to the guest house in the afternoon to copy the orders I received, those people are only having their breakfast. Yet if I dare to act in such a manner, my director will get rid of me momentarily. Although who knows, maybe it would do me no harm. If I did not keep myself in check for my parents, I would have retired long ago. I would have come up to my employer and told him what I think about him. I imagine he would have fallen off the desk! He has such a strange habit of climbing on his desk and talking down to any employee who has to come close to the table since the director hears badly. However, there is still a hope: as soon as I save enough money to repay my parents’ debt, which will take about five or six more years, I will do it. That is when we say our farewells once and forever. For now, I have to get up since my train leaves at five.”

Then he then glanced at the alarm clock that kept ticking on top of his chest. “Good God!”, he thought. It was half past six, and the clock arrows were quietly moving on. It was, in fact, a quarter to seven. Has the alarm clock not gone off? From his bed, he could see that it was correctly set to go off at four o’clock and it, undoubtedly, did. Yet how could he have slept through this earth-shattering sound? Well, his sleep was troublesome, though, apparently, rather tight. What was he to do now? The next train leaves at seven o’clock; to arrive there in time, he should desperately hurry, but his assortment of samplings is not yet put together and he does not feel lively and energized. Besides, even in case he does arrive at the train station in time, there is no way for him to escape a scolding from the director because the messenger was on duty by the five o’clock train and made a report regarding Gregor’s lateness long ago. The messenger, a person possessing neither stamina nor wits, was the director’s pet. What if Gregor pretends to be sick? Yet it would appear highly unpleasant and improbable as well, since, in the course of the five years of his service as a salesman, he has never been sick. The director, of course, would have brought over a doctor and scolded Gregor’s parents for raising such an indolent son and would have rejected any objections referring to the aforementioned doctor, according to whom any person on earth is perfectly healthy and is merely refusing to work. And would not he be right in that case? Aside from the drowsiness, which was strange to experience after such a long sleep, Gregor actually felt great and even found himself in a ravenous appetite.

While he was hastily thinking it all over, still unwilling to leave his bed - the alarm clock has just announced it was a quarter to seven - someone cautiously knocked on the door above his head.

  “Gregor”, he heard (this was his mother), “it is already a quarter to seven. Weren’t you going to leave?”

  This tender voice! Gregor felt scared upon hearing the horrifying response produced by his own, which was undoubtedly still his former voice, was now mixed with a suppressed yet stubborn squeaking that only made words sound clear for a brief moment after which it distorted them to a point when one would have to question whether he misheard everything. Gregor wished to elaborate and explain everything in detail, yet, due to such circumstances, all he could say was, “Yes, yes, thank you, mother, I am about to get up.”

  Because of a thick wooden door, the change in his voice has apparently remained unnoticed outside, as, calmed by his words, his mother walked away. Yet this short interaction drew the other family members’ attention to the fact that Gregor, despite all expectations, was still at home, and his father was already knocking - slightly, but with a fist - on his door.

  “Gregor, Gregor!”, he screamed. “What is the matter?”. After a moment, he called once again, this time lowering his voice: “Gregor, Gregor!”.

  Behind another door his sister spoke quietly and sympathetically:

“Gregor! Are you not feeling well? Do you need help with anything?”

  Responding to all of them at once by uttering, “I am ready”, Gregor tried to deprive his voice of any irregularity with long pauses and a clear pronunciation. His father would have returned to his breakfast if it was not for his sister who continued to whisper:

“Gregor, I am begging you, open the door.”

  Yet Gregor was not even considering opening it, feeling blissfully grateful for his habit of thoughtfully locking all doors for the night.

  At first, he wanted to get up calmly and without any interference, and then he could worry about the rest since he - it has now become clear to him - will not reach any grand conclusion lying in bed. He remembered that sometimes while he was lying in bed he felt a slight pain which was probably caused by sleeping in an uncomfortable position, and as soon as he got up, it appeared that the pain was a mere product of his imagination; he thus wondered how today’s trouble would resolve itself. He had no doubt that the change in his voice was just a precursor of a disease common to all salesmen, the harsh cold.

  Getting rid of the blanket turned out to be quite an easy task; it was enough to inflate his stomach to make it fall by itself. Yet the situation got worse after that, mostly because Gregor was too wide now.

  He needed hands to get up; but everything he had instead of them was a multitude of legs, which kept moving chaotically and were impossible to cope with. If he wanted to bend a leg, the first thing it did was stretching itself out. When he finally managed to do what he wanted with that leg, others,  - moving as if they just won their freedom -  resort to painful agitation. “I cannot keep lingering in bed”, Gregor said to himself.

  At first, he attempted to crawl out of bed with his upper body first and started to carefully move his head towards the bed’s edge. He managed to do that with ease and, despite its width and weight, his body eventually slowly followed his head. But when his head, after moving over the bed’s edge, hung in the air, he became afraid of moving forward in this manner. He was by no means inclined to faint at this moment; it was better to stay in bed.

  Yet, following a brief rest he needed after those pains, he returned to his previous position and saw that his legs were floundering even more frantically and failed to bring peace and order; at that moment he told himself again that staying in bed was no longer a valid option and that risking everything for the slightest hope of getting himself out of bed was the only sensible decision. However, at the same time, he reminded himself that calm reasoning was way more efficient than yielding to desperation. He fixed his gaze on the window, but, unfortunately, the sight of the morning fog that concealed even the opposite side of a narrow street was not cheerful or reassuring. “It is already seven o’clock,” he told himself as he heard his alarm ring once again, “it is already seven o’clock and yet it is still so foggy.” For a while, he lied still and breathed quietly, as if he was expecting the silence to bring back the natural setting.