Our Brief Commentary on The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis offers the reader a look into the step-by-step process of alienation. Instead of just showing a man getting isolated from the rest of his peers, Kafka creates a better way to tell the tale of one man's alienation. "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he gound himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." In this novella, Gregor Samsa awakes as a bug, a beatle to be exact. His alienation from others, mostly his family, is physical as well as emotional and psychological. Franz Kafka's novella offered another take on the theme of alienation. It was new and fresh, it truly gave the reader something new to think about or at the very least consider. "The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.” (William Makepeace Thackeray) Franz Kafka accomplished exactly that.