The metamorphosis of his writing, Kafka’s real accomplishment, takes readers to a place at once familiar and unfamiliar. Intrigued by this immediacy, critics have celebrated Kafka for his “universality.” This flattery overreaches perhaps, but the term “universal” was not picked by accident. Kafka’s fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It’s a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there’s no map.

But Kafka’s universe nonetheless resonates deeply with who we are and who we’ve become. Early readers who hailed Kafka’s universality had never seen their lives in books, and they had only dimly recognized the “Kafkaesque” as an unnamed thing. Kafka was among the first to describe bourgeois labor and its degrading impact on the soul. In his fable “Poseidon,” Kafka even portrays the god of the sea as consumed with tedious, never-ending paperwork. Kafka brings to mind a vocabulary of images—an endless trail of meaningless forms to be filled out, a death apparatus to rival Poe’s pendulum, a man wearing a bowler hat, a gigantic insect. Thanks to interpretations like Orson Welles’s film version of The Trial, Kafka’s universe has expanded to include rows of office desks, oppressive light, and snapping typewriters. Kafka understood the trajectory of bureaucracy, and his literature predicts the nightmarish corporate world we live in today.

Kafka’s fiction, though concrete in its particulars, suggests an array of interpretive possibilities. “The Metamorphosis” alone has inspired Catholics to argue a case of transubstantiation, Freudians to extrapolate Gregor’s castration by his father, and Marxists to infer the alienation of man in modern society. Kafka’s descriptions vacillate between realism and allegory—a narrative style best described as parabolic. But unlike a traditional parable with an easy moral, Kafka’s parables resist successful comprehension.

This volume has as its parentheses Kafka’s two best-known parables, “A Message from the Emperor” and “Before the Law.” They both illustrate Kafka’s near-nauseating ability to describe infinite regress. “A Message from the Emperor” checks any firm interpretation with its simple but devastating phrase “or so they say” (p. 3) in the opening line, which calls into question the tale’s validity, as if the account is rumored. Additionally, the “you,” the second person, has dreamed the whole thing up (p. 3). This second piece of information not only contradicts the first, it turns the parable on its head—why would someone, especially “you,” which seems to refer to the reader, dream up something so unnecessarily complicated, especially when it concerns something as momentous as an emperor’s message? This “you” can stand for Kafka himself—a writer who saw an infinite corkscrew of obstacles spiraling before him, and yet felt compelled to record his own deliberate steps. “Before the Law” also features an Inferno-like layering and again pits an unsophisticated character against an implacable system, unknowable in its complexity. Though the man from the country never recognizes it, his defeat by the Law, capital L, is a foregone conclusion. The Law’s only purpose is to shut out the man and, in so doing, to destroy him.

Kafka’s parables are epitomes of his larger works (“Before the Law,” though published first on its own, is actually part of The Trial). Their shortness only concentrates the reader’s perplexity. Robert Wenniger claims that Kafka’s father engendered in Kafka a disparity between language and meaning. In fact, silence was Kafka’s typical response to his father. By writing incomprehensible texts, Wenniger argues, Kafka assumes the role of the father, an authorial position over the reader (Wenniger, “Sounding Out the Silence of Gregor Samsa: Kafka’s Rhetoric of Dyscommunication”). This leaves the reader confused and vainly searching for meaning. Of course, Kafka shares this privilege with many of the world’s great writers, whose work is often a challenge to interpret. In “On Parables” Kafka writes, “Parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already” (The Complete Stories, 1971, p. 457).

In Kafka’s formulation, the parable is used by the sage to gesture toward something larger than, or invisible to, himself. The need to make this gesture is innate. But the parable dissolves the moment we understand it; the gesture would not be beyond language if it could be defined. We lose in parable the moment we pin things down to an accessible meaning. Realizing it is impossible to discuss or interpret Kafka without losing in parable is the first and perhaps only step we can take.

Kafka’s parables not only fall apart once we interpret them, they are impossible to put into practice. If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka’s true subject. To get at this conundrum, we must explore discretely the dichotomies Kafka himself con flates—dreams versus reality, idleness versus work, vermin versus human, child versus adult. For Kafka, each of these antagonistic pairs represents an authorial relationship. It is possible to lump the lowly—dreams, idleness, vermin, child—on one side, and the authority figures—reality, work, human, adult—on the other. But ultimately this equation is too simple, for Kafka himself fails to pick a side. He calls both sides into question and finds them equally detestable. Unbraiding Kafka’s authorial relationships is the only way to find out why.

Dreams—and, perhaps more importantly, nightmares—held a singular influence over Kafka and his writing. Kafka’s nightmares are so natural, so convincing, that they creep into the reader’s mind almost subliminally. He metamorphoses reality into a new, insidiously darker one, often within a single sentence. In “The Judgment,” Georg’s father throws at him an old, unfamiliar newspaper (p. 64), an actual object that evidences a deception, staggering in its elaborateness—Georg’s father has been feigning his infirmity, only pretending to read his newspapers, for years! In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka speeds time ticklessly: “It was half past six and the hands were steadily advancing, actually past the half hour and already closer to three quarters past” (p. 8). Later, the head clerk arrives at the Samsa flat to investigate Gregor’s tardiness, at the moment of his tardiness. Even if Gregor’s absence from work was judged grave enough to send the head clerk himself, the event remains absurd. Somehow, the head clerk would have had to foresee Gregor’s lateness and taken an early train to show up at the flat just minutes after Gregor should have been at his office desk.

In “A Country Doctor,” the sudden, ominous appearance of the groom is punctuated by his mysterious knowledge of the maid’s name and his tacit intent to ravish her. Following this, the doctor is whisked away in his newly harnessed trap, as if beyond his control, completely unable to assist his maid, who locks herself in the house: “I hear my front door splinter and burst as the groom attacks it, and then my eyes and ears are swamped with a blinding rush of the senses. But even this lasts only a moment, for, as if my patient’s courtyard opens just outside my gate, I am already there” (p. 124). The ten-mile distance between the doctor’s village and his patient’s house, the reality that precipitated the need for strong horses in the first place, evaporates.

Nightmare-turned-reality is the power of “The Metamorphosis.” Gregor Samsa is a different animal, a unique figure even among canonical supernatural tales. Without the permanence of Gregor’s monstrous form, we would be left with something like the absurd comedy of Gogol’s “The Nose,” in which Kovalyov’s nose leaves his face to prance about the town disguised as a state councillor but in the end returns to its proper place unchanged. Without Gregor’s inimitable subjectivity, we would be left essentially with the horror of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the painting of Dorian becomes monstrous while Dorian himself remains ageless, until the fey moment when the two destroy each other, leaving only a moral behind.

Instead, we arrive at a story that cannot claim the supernatural as one of its elements. The mystery of “The Metamorphosis” emerges in one of the most famous, and most variously translated, lines in Western literature—its first: “As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (p. 7). This is marvelously funny. Instead of waking up from a nightmare, Gregor wakes up into one. Reality, the only balm for bad dreams, is significantly less reassuring when you wake up hideously disfigured. But in Kafka’s fiction, the rational and the irrational intertwine menacingly. Often these irrational elements spring from the minds of his characters and manifest themselves physically. Ideas are metamorphosed into reality, with little effort on the characters’ parts. Here Gregor’s idea, originating in his “unsettling dreams,” has followed him into the real world. The echo and confirmation of this reality comes in the second paragraph: “It was no dream” (p. 7). Unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who, after transforming several times, wakes up, Gregor’s most bizarre adventure is real, and has only just begun.

Kafka treats the bed, representative of both illness and idleness, as the birthplace of these irrational ideas. The first sentence introduces Gregor not only in his nightmarish form but also ensnared in his bed, as if caught in the grips of tangling irrationality. Gregor spends most of the first section of “The Metamorphosis” trying to extricate himself from his bed: “in bed he could never think anything through to a reasonable conclusion” (p. 9). In viewing the chaos of his legs waving in the air, Gregor tells himself “that he could not possibly stay in bed and that the logical recourse was to risk everything in the mere hope of freeing himself from the bed” (p. 10). By escaping, he hopes to shut out the irrationality of his new form and return to his old self. We learn that Gregor was unrelentingly reasonable as a human; the head clerk booms through the door, “I have always known you to be a quiet, reasonable man and now you suddenly seem to be indulging in rash eccentricities” (p. 14). For a brief second, Gregor even entertains simply sleeping it off (p. 7) or resting in bed in hope of a cure (p. 10). Here he employs a reverse logic, an irrational hope that the bed will magically restore his “unquestionable state” (p. 11). It does not. In fact, Gregor’s human form isn’t restored once he’s free from bed either. But his irrational belief that it would be was itself generated in the bed. This divides Kafka’s universe into the irrational—dreams, notions deriving from the bed—and the rational—reality, working, family. The surreality of Kafka’s fiction consists in his constant traffic between these two realms.

In Kafka’s story “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” Eduard Raban fantasizes about splitting into two forms: one, to remain in bed all day, dreaming; the other, to go forth and conduct the business of the world. Interestingly, Raban envisions the “bed” form as a large beetle, the worldly self as the shell of his human form. Raban thinks to himself,

Kafka’s metaphor of a man’s transformation into vermin is unique not only because the change comes from the man himself, but also because it critiques modernity and the impossibility of living functionally within it. In this sense “The Metamorphosis” stands as one of the greatest indictments against work ever written. Gregor’s impetus to transform reflects the illogicality of working life, the impossibility of sustaining a work ethic. After the novella’s fantastic first sentence, Gregor searches for clues that might explain his newfound condition. After ignoring the overwhelming evidence of his new body after the briefest of perusals, Gregor looks about his room. Out his window, he perceives dreary weather, which causes him to feel “quite melancholy” (p. 7). It is typical Kafka for a man, who has most recently discovered he occupies the form of a monstrous vermin, to feel saddened by the weather. But this melancholic whim extends beyond Kafka’s humor and points to Gregor’s chronic dread of mornings. It’s a prelude to his vitriolic damnation of working life:

The ritualized actions listed in Gregor’s exclamatory account of his job give the impression of a thoroughly regimented life-style. Because we never know Gregor in his human form, we have to piece him together after the fact. It seems Gregor’s human self was like most of us at some point or another—weak, afraid, submissive to corporate and familial pressures. He lacks the space for creativity, and even irrationality. Immediately upon his awakening, Gregor’s gaze falls upon the illustration of a woman that hangs in a frame he carved with his fretsaw. The pride and enthusiasm he has for his gilt frame is evident, and it resurfaces when he protects it from his sister and mother (p. 33) in their unwitting attempt to strip away the only proof that Gregor was once human. The picture represents Gregor’s single creation—or in Marxist terms, the one product he is allowed to keep. For Gregor, work precludes the possibility of creation; in the life of a traveling salesman, the gilt frame is the exception rather than the rule.

But why go to the trouble of changing into a monstrous vermin? Why didn’t Gregor just quit his job? For Gregor this was impossible: “If I were not holding back because of my parents, I would have quit long ago” (p. 8). A loyal and loving son, Gregor feels obligated to pay off his parents’ debt. Simply quitting would betray that loyalty. After his transformation, Gregor overhears his family discuss their bleak financial situation and feels “flushed with shame and grief” (p. 27). He despairs of the prospect of any one of his family members, especially his sister Grete, working to make ends meet. Gregor blames himself for spoiling the quiet life he had previously provided for them. He knows firsthand the impersonality, the lifelessness of modern labor, and he shudders at the thought of his family experiencing it.

The family members do indeed get jobs, and as they do so, they complete the reversal of Gregor’s metamorphosis. The transformation of Gregor into vermin, and his resulting abdication of the breadwinner role, forces the Samsa family to transform from vermin. The family members, who have lived parasitically off Gregor, change into tired, silent, and empty people who more and more resemble the pre-insect Gregor. They must work even when they are at home to accommodate their three boarders, and thus they degrade into obsequious servants. Eventually the sister is resolute in her decision that Gregor must be gotten rid of: “We all work too hard to come home to this interminable torture” (p. 46). Here, because the family’s day is filled with the torment of working, the additional strain of Gregor becomes unbearable. Their inability to disengage from work in the evening deprives them of the only possible respite from labor, and life without some kind of rest is torture. The worst irony is that taking care of the verminous Gregor is a filthy chore. Gregor, by escaping work, has not only forced his former dependents into labor, but has become work: disgusting work that only his disgraced family can perform.

Kafka returns again and again to the idea of vermin—the revolting nomads who communicate like birds in “An Old Leaf,” the dehumanized, emaciated hunger artist, the strange mouse people, among whom even Josephine barely distinguishes herself, and the man from the country in “Before the Law,” who by the end holds the fleas in the doorkeeper’s fur collar above himself. Max Brod actually refers to “The Metamorphosis” as Kafka’s “vermin story” (Franz Kafka: A Biography, 1960, p. 18). Additionally, Kafka regularly inserts himself in his fiction, giving his characters names like K. Some critics have even connected the two short as of Samsa with the identical vowel construction of Kafka. Vermin is in the eye of the beholder, and Kafka clearly sees a self-resemblance.

For Kafka, thinking about vermin was a way to understand the universe, and his own place in it. “A Message from the Emperor” begins by describing “you” as the emperor’s “single most contemptible subject, the minuscule shadow that has fled the farthest distance from the imperial sun” (p. 3). The “you” lives in shadow like a rat or a cockroach. Further, this shadow darkens against the authorial source of light, “the imperial sun.” The lowliness of vermin is created by a hierarchy, at the top of which is an amorphous, omnipotent authority. Kafka’s short parable “The Emperor” echoes this idea: “When a surf flings a drop of water on to the land, that does not interfere with the eternal rolling of the sea, on the contrary, it is caused by it” (The Basic Kafka, 1979, p. 183). Interestingly, Kafka again chooses a laborer to play the role of vermin.

In Kafka’s universe authority and vermin are natural enemies, and each gives rise to the other. In “Letter to His Father,” Kafka addresses himself in the voice of his father, Hermann:

In Kafka’s story “A Report to an Academy,” the narrator, who five years previous had occupied the form of an ape, has been transformed into a human. In this tale it is difficult to draw a black line between the narrator’s two selves; the differences are subtle. The narrator’s tone implies that his gradual transformation from an ape into a human represents an improvement. But Kafka questions this authorial status of humans. Driven by the desire to escape his cage, the ape observes his observers; the narrator writes, “it was so easy to imitate these people” (Complete Stories, p. 255). Thus Kafka diffuses the differences between animals and humans. In so doing, he extends the reader’s natural sympathy for human characters to include vermin, and applies the reader’s natural aversion to vermin to humans instead. In Kafka’s fiction, it is possible for humans and vermin to function as mutual metaphors, and though the dichotomy between vermin and human remains, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose a side.

Gregor Samsa plays host to the conflict between vermin and human in that he does not disown his mind as he does his body. Throughout the novella, he retains his human consciousness, memory, and ability to understand human speech and intentions. Because of his residual human perception, Gregor never sees his armor-plated form as even potentially liberating; instead his in-habitation of an insect’s body is tortured and guilt-ridden. Wilhelm Emrich argues that the impersonal nature of modern life prevents Gregor from recognizing the freedom of his “pre-human” form (commentary in The Metamorphosis, Bantam edition, 1972). Instead Gregor views it as monstrous, alien, and other. During Gregor’s initial reconnaissance of his room, he seeks solace from his former humanity; his gaze falls upon his work samples, his desk, his gilt frame. He all but ignores his new, unsightly form. Gregor hungers obsessively for the explainable; his absolute need to hurry off to work represents a severe form of denial, itself a human tendency: “What if I went back to sleep for a while and forgot all this foolishness” (p. 7). He courts rationality out of an obligation to his former self. But his feigned, humanlike demonstrations are silly: trying to stand upright, speaking to his parents and the head clerk, returning to work.

Upon seeing his unpacked samples, Gregor admits to himself that he does not feel “particularly fresh and energetic” (p. 8), an absurd notion for a man-size insect to ponder. He presumes the change in his voice to be caused by a severe cold, “an ailment common among traveling salesmen” (p. 10). But Kafka does not let Gregor off so easily. By positioning the head clerk at the bedroom door, Kafka keeps the reader from believing in Gregor’s self-delusion. Upon hearing Gregor speak, the head clerk says, “That was the voice of an animal” (p. 15). Gregor’s metamorphosis is real, and his efforts to deny it are frail.

In “Wedding Preparations” by contrast, Raban dreams of frittering away his days in bed. His weightless disposition comes from his ability to indulge in his irrational side. The pre-vermin Gregor would have considered such an activity frivolous. Before his transformation, Gregor never gave in to distractions other than fretsawing. He stayed home each night and busied himself constantly, “reading the paper or studying train schedules” (p. 12). Kafka himself worked at the same job all his life. At his office, he wrote tracts such as “On Mandatory Insurance in the Construction Industry” and “Workers’ Accident Insurance and Management.” In the evenings Kafka remained cloistered in his room, where he worked on his various manuscripts. By contrast, Gregor has no such dedication; he’s learned to suppress his personality, to submit unconditionally to authority. As the head clerk has it, Gregor’s reasonableness derives from not indulging in “rash eccentricities” (p. 14). In fact, Gregor champions himself for his impersonal habit of locking the doors at night (p. 9). For Kafka, an oppressive rationality and the human experience, at least within the modern bourgeois value system, are synonymous. Gregor, who is fluent only in rationality and is loyal to the human social ideal, is tortured by his insectival state.

Consequently, Gregor fails to see that he’s capable of conscious irrationality. The metamorphosis seems a mistake, a wrong turn, a trap out of which the only escape is death. Walter Sokel goes so far as to say that Gregor’s true form is death (commentary in The Metamorphosis, Bantam edition, 1972). Perhaps in this light Gregor’s insect form represents a slow death, a chronic, fatal illness. Kafka saw his tuberculosis as a liberation; interestingly, he called it “the animal.” Further, Kafka found his passages on death to be his most compelling pieces of writing. But “The Metamorphosis” is more than a tale of suicide. For if Gregor is ultimately dead in the first sentence, what is the point of reading further? There must be a glint of hope for his salvation—and there is. If Gregor is capable of turning himself into a monstrous vermin, then he can change back. He just doesn’t want to.

It is guilt—that most revolting of all human sentiments—that prevents Gregor from embracing his insect form. Out of guilt, Gregor chooses not to relinquish his role of family provider. Though he laments his obligation, he never gives it up. In the final section, Gregor considers “the idea that the next time the door opened he would take control of the family affairs as he had done in the past” (p. 39). Rather than the absurdity of Gregor’s earlier denials, here Kafka focuses on Gregor’s ability to puzzle out his situation. There is an implied agency, as if Gregor truly possesses the ability to snap out of his state and return to his old self. Whatever his decision, he can’t help but fail. His escape is ultimately doomed by his utter devotion to his family, which never diminishes. The guilt brought on by Gregor’s newfound inability to provide for his family—financially and emotionally—prevents him from attaining any sort of liberation. Perhaps recognizing this conundrum, Gregor chooses to remain an insect. Though both conditions are unlivable, he prefers vermin life to human; it’s the lesser of two tortures.

Kafka’s story “The Burrow” concerns a character who inhabits the space between human and vermin. Though the narrator differentiates himself from the “field mice” (Complete Stories, p. 326) and “all sorts of small fry” (Complete Stories, p. 327) that occupy his burrow, he uses his unspecified but presumably human body in an animal fashion. He pounds the tunnel walls firm with his forehead (Complete Stories, p. 328); he fights and kills rats with his jaws (Complete Stories, p. 329). Yet the burrow itself, which the narrator dubs “Castle Keep,” is the result of deliberate, extensive planning and constant maintenance. Further, the burrow’s effectiveness and impregnability inspire the narrator’s dreams: “tears of joy and deliverance still glisten on my beard when I awaken” (Complete Stories, p. 333).

The logic that gives rise to Castle Keep is one twisted by absolute isolation. It is the logic of both fantasy and ignorance, a child’s uninformed rationale. In fact, the burrow is much like a child’s fort—but one inhabited by someone driven insane with fear. The narrator’s incessant calculations and preparations become increasingly insular, until his mind is saturated with a baseless paranoia. This compulsively cogitative yet ultimately ignorant perspective is much like the psychology of Dostoevsky’s underground man. By the end of “The Burrow” the narrator’s mind no longer resembles human consciousness at all, but instead a fight-or-flight, animal mentality.

The rift between child and adult roles is at the heart of “The Metamorphosis.” Gregor, like the narrator of “The Burrow,” possesses the mentality of a child. In Kafka’s universe the child is the least authorial figure, and therefore can be likened to vermin. It is natural for Gregor’s parents and the head clerk to speak to Gregor condescendingly through the door. It’s almost as if they regard Gregor as throwing a childish fit. Later, the family, led ferociously by the father, forces Gregor into his room like a naughty child. And Gregor, for his part, has no interest in adult matters. He loathes his profession. He has no intention of finding a companion; the only woman in his life, besides his sister and mother, is the pin-up girl in the gilt frame. When Gregor looks around his room, Kafka, again with excruciating humor, describes it as “a regular human bedroom” (p. 7)—as if Gregor’s room would be decorated to the tastes of a monstrous vermin. But the precise phrase in the original German, kleines Menschenzimmer, implies that it resembles a child’s room.

Gregor, like Georg Bendemann of “The Judgment,” is typified by his familial relationships. (The other “son,” Karl Rossmann of “The Stoker,” differs because we meet him on his trip to America—he’s on his own.) Both Gregor and Georg are confined to their parents’ homes as adults. Adult children regularly slip into childhood roles when visiting their parents. But for Kafka’s characters, this stunting is not temporary. Kafka himself lived with his parents until a year before his death, and right before he died he was forced to return because of his tuberculosis. Living for so long in proximity to his parents made Kafka feel like a child—the same child he was prior to his physical and literary development. These developments vanished before his parents, who remained relatively unchanged—they even outlived him!—and whose authorial position over him was total. Walter Benjamin once described a photograph of Kafka in which Kafka’s “immensely sad eyes dominate the landscape” (“Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death”). Thomas Mann wrote about Kafka in much the same way—painting a man with “large dark eyes, at once dreamy and penetrating” and an “expression at once childlike and wise” (commentary in The Castle: The Definitive Edition). The only difference is that Mann was talking about Kafka’s final portrait, and Benjamin was looking at a picture of Franz taken when he was six years old. Kafka never grew up.

Kafka’s suffocation as an adult child leaves its trace on Gregor and Georg, who each suffers a child’s frustration at having no say, yet finds himself in a caretaker’s role fraught with responsibility and guilt. Each is sentenced to death by his parents. Gregor’s devotion to his parents and his sister forces him to interpret the family’s grievances as a condemnation, whereas Georg’s judgment is about as direct as you can get. And, hauntingly, Gregor and Georg each carries out his own sentence. The adult child—another of Kafka’s fusions of different states—is little prepared for the world. Even Eduard Raban’s fantasy of splitting into two selves in “Wedding Preparations” is a child’s attempt at evasion: “Can’t I do it the way I always used to as a child in matters that were dangerous?” (Complete Stories, p. 55). The answer to Raban’s question is no. Kafka’s characters, regardless of how much agency they possess, are doomed to fail. As Kafka writes in “A Message from the Emperor,” the messenger’s arrival “could never, ever happen” (p. 3).

If we think of Gregor as having a child’s mentality, it is natural to sympathize with him—especially if we see him as trapped in the role of family provider. This sympathy is not altogether different from what we feel toward Dickens’s Oliver Twist, that supreme victim of child labor. Yet this sympathy does not hold, for it is always followed by a repulsion toward Gregor’s physical ity: “A brown fluid had come from his mouth, oozed over the key, and dripped onto the floor” (p. 16). Kafka further complicates matters by writing “The Metamorphosis” in the third person. This mode of narration allows for Gregor’s death at the end, which confirms definitively that the metamorphosis was not a hallucination or a dream. But though the narrative follows Gregor’s awareness, we always have enough room to reevaluate how we feel about him.

Some of our sympathy falls to the sister, and even to the feeble parents—none of whom are fit to work. But ultimately we remain loyal to Gregor, especially because his family forsakes him. His sister stops tending to him (p. 40) and locks him in his room (p. 48); his mother faints upon seeing an enormous insect clinging to the wall (p. 33); the father, in brief, subjects him to every abuse imaginable. At the expense of Gregor’s sacrifice, the sister, at the end of the story, stretches her arrogant body and gets the liberation Gregor longed for. Under Gregor’s care first, and then her parents’, the sister enjoys a healthy childhood, one leading to physical and mental development, and one in which she isn’t trapped. Yet our loyalty to Gregor extends even beyond his death, and his sister’s cheery success story offers but a bitter pill.

In the pivotal scene of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor’s sister begins to play her violin. Listening to her music, Gregor “felt as though the path to his unknown hungers was being cleared” (p. 44). We have no indication that Gregor Samsa enjoyed music while he was human; his intention to send his sister to the Conservatory was to him a financial endeavor, an investment in her future. Yet to be moved by music is essentially human; it reflects sensitivity. The life Gregor led as a human being left no room for this kind of appreciation. But, by regressing into an animal, his sensibility has become refined rather than coarsened. As vermin he comes closer to a spiritual liberation, of which human beings at their best are capable. Perhaps in death Gregor attains salvation, the ultimate metamorphosis. But regardless, he’s started down that path in life, through humility and contemplation. The Samsa family, which does not comprehend this less visual transformation in Gregor, interrupts it. Instead of liberation Gregor attains only confinement—both spatial and metaphysical.

In “The Metamorphosis” the physical transformation, rather than its dénouement, is merely a premise. By contrast, Ovid’s classic, Metamorphoses, focuses on the process and novelty of transformation. Ovid consistently establishes an explicit causal, if not moral, relationship between a character’s actions and the consequence of metamorphosis. In the tale of Arachne, another story of a human transformed into a bug, haughty Arachne refuses to admit that her spinning skills derive from any teacher or divine source. The spinster goes so far as to challenge Minerva (the Roman correlate of the Greek goddess Athena) to a spinning contest. After Arachne defeats Minerva, the latter strikes her with a wooden shuttle—an action much like a spanking or a public caning. Out of despair Arachne tries to hang herself, but Minerva simultaneously spares and punishes the weaver by changing her into a spider.

This metamorphosis is not mysterious. Arachne’s transformation is the direct result of Minerva’s anger, caused by Arachne’s own impudence. For Ovid, Minerva and the rest of the deities represent the highest authority; the gods are not to be challenged or regarded as equals. Even though Minerva is defeated, her authority is absolute. As Arachne attempts suicide—again, to make the final transformation—her agency is stripped by Minerva, who has other transformative plans in mind.

It is easy to decipher the story of Arachne, whether you take her side or Minerva’s, but Kafka’s moral, if there is one, is not obvious or logical. The abandonment a reader feels at the end of any text is especially acute with Kafka. The few clues he leaves us are not only incomplete, they are contradictory. Kafka is notoriously incapable of completion. His three novels—The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, all of them unfinished—were assembled by Max Brod, whom we have to thank for exhuming a Franz Kafka who seems to come very close, one might guess, to saying what he means. But whenever Kafka reached so deeply within himself—whether in the guise of Joseph K., simply K., or Karl Rossmann—he eventually abandoned the work. His one pride was the torrential composition of “The Judgment,” which he wrote in a single night. Perhaps any project that took more than eight hours to finish lost its luster; perhaps an “opening out of the body and the soul” (Diaries, 1910-1913, p. 276) was too painful for an extended period; and perhaps this explains why Kafka went years at a time without writing a word of fiction.

Kafka regarded the end of “The Metamorphosis”—its composition interrupted by a business trip—as “unreadable.” He also wrote in his diary that he found it “bad,” but of course Kafka relished his failure. Failure is precisely what he expected and resolved to accomplish—and he hid behind it. Kafka’s literature has no end, no borders like those that frame Escher’s artworks. He does not write in black and white. And unlike Escher, Kafka was unable to manage the subject of liberation with any success. Yet it is “The Metamorphosis,” and not necessarily “The Judgment,” that is remembered by readers and that will be taught in schools forever. Kafka, it seems, is at his best when he fails.

His failure puts the burden of meaning on readers. We must reconstruct Kafka, as we do Gregor Samsa. That is what critics have been trying to do for generations—indeed, Kafka’s reputation wasn’t made until after his death. He is locked in time and cannot be questioned. In the end, Kafka and his fiction are inextricable. The only way out is to metamorphose Kafka into something we can parse. We have to insinuate ourselves into his universe, his allegory. Only in this way can we see our own reality for the puzzle it is. As the disconnect between author and reader dissolves, Kafka’s language becomes a metaphor for the greater disconnection between ourselves and our environment. Though we lose in parable, perhaps in reading Kafka we can finish what he himself could not complete and, in so doing, nourish our own unknown hungers.