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Gregor Samsa awakes one morning in his family's apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic pest. Gregor does not immediately recoil from his insect form, but instead chooses to lament his job by saying, "How am I going to get to work?" and the general misery of the rainy weather outside. Indeed, the narrative establishes the poor conditions as the cause of his bed... More

Gregor Samsa awakes one morning in his family's apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic pest. Gregor does not immediately recoil from his insect form, but instead chooses to lament his job by saying, "How am I going to get to work?" and the general misery of the rainy weather outside. Indeed, the narrative establishes the poor conditions as the cause of his bed-ridden state. Gregor works as a traveling salesman, and, as it is usual for traveling salesmen to move constantly from place to place, he is accustomed to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings and various circumstances. The true reality of his metamorphosis is complete when he sees his many legs waving in the air. But from then on he resists any conscious recognition regarding his change or the fact that a change indeed happened-everything but the recognition of his separation from the others. The problem Gregor has at the beginning of the story is that his family and a messenger from his boss are knocking at the door, concerned for him, and he's unable to flip off his back onto the floor.

The weight on Gregor's life is that he is the financial head of the household; nobody else apparently works in his family (or is able to work); their whole present and comfortable existence relies upon Gregor's employment at the "firm." Most of the weight is the debt which his father owes to the employer for whom Gregor now works.

Gregor becomes progressively unable to communicate with his family, and even before his physical appearance is revealed to them, his voice becomes completely unintelligible. He retains his cognitive faculties, though his family remains unaware of this.

Curiously, his condition does not arouse a sense of surprise or incredulity in the eyes of his family, who merely despise it as an indication of their impending burden. However, most of the story revolves around his interactions with his family, with whom he lives, and their shock, denial, and repulsion whenever they are confronted with his physical condition. Horrified by his appearance, they take to shutting Gregor into his room, but Grete, his sister, tries to care for him by providing him with food and water. In his new form, he rejects his erstwhile favourite food (milk and bread), preferring stale, rotten food, but later loses his appetite completely. He also develops the fears of an insect, being effectively shooed away by hissing voices and stamping feet. Because of the effect that his appearance has on the rest of the family, Gregor decides to hide underneath a sofa when somebody has to come into his room, later going to the extent of draping a sheet over it to hide more effectively.

Because Gregor can't provide financially any more, the other family members get jobs: Gregor's father comes out of retirement to work at a bank, his mother sews fine underwear for a fashion house and his sister works in a shop and gets a position on a secretarial course. One day, when Gregor emerges from his room, his father chases him around the dining room table and pelts him with apples. One of the apples becomes embedded in his back, causing an infection.

While he is confined to his room, Gregor's only activities are looking out of his window and crawling up the walls and on the ceiling. Financial hardship befalls the family, and Grete's caretaking deteriorates. Over the course of the story, Gregor's vision grows dimmer, and his physical size shrinks: where he is initially about the size of a human, and can't get through a single door without trouble, he later becomes small enough to crawl up the wall and sit over a picture frame. Due to his infection and his hunger, he is soon barely able to move at all, though. Later, his parents take in lodgers to supplement their income, and his room gets used as a dumping area for unwanted objects, and is seldom cleaned. Gregor becomes dirty himself, covered in dust and old bits of rotten food.

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