Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a "monstrous vermin". He initially considers the transformation to be temporary and slowly ponders the consequences of this metamorphosis. Stuck on his back and unable to get up and leave the bed, Gregor reflects on his job as a traveling salesman and cloth merchant, which he characterizes as being full of "temporary and constantly changing human relationships, which never come from the heart". He sees his employer as a despot and would quickly quit his job if he were not his family's sole breadwinner and working off his...

Franz Kafka, a Prague Jew who wrote in German, barely published his works during his lifetime, only excerpts from the novels The Process (1925) and The Castle (1926) and a few short stories. The most remarkable of his short stories, The Transformation, was written in the fall of 1912 and published in 1915. The hero of the "Transformation" Gregor Zamza - the son of not rich Prague inhabitants, people with purely materialistic needs. Five years ago, his father went bankrupt, and Gregor entered the service of one of his father’s creditors, became a traveling salesman, a cloth merchant. Since...