I
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found
himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-
like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly,
slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was
hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many
legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about
helplessly as he looked.
“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream. His room, a
proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its
four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the
table—Samsa was a travelling salesman—and above it there hung a picture
that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice,
gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat
upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm
towards the viewer.
Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of
rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad. “How
about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense”, he thought,
but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to
sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn’t get into that position.
However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to
where he was. He must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that
he wouldn’t have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when he
began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before.
“Oh, God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen!
Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more
effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there’s the
curse of travelling, worries about making train connections, bad and
irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can
