As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
Bam. No setup. No explanation. Kafka drops us into the surreal like it’s just another Monday. And while most people latch onto that legendary first sentence (fair—it’s iconic), my favorite line comes just after, buried in the buzzing horror of it all, is calm:
"How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense."
It’s not profound. It doesn’t beg for dissection. It doesn’t scream literary brilliance. But man, does it feel real.
Now, don’t worry—I’m not going to give you some life-altering breakdown of The Metamorphosis. This is not one of those “this book rewired my soul” type of blog posts. Honestly? I expected more. I expected to finish the book and emerge into a new mental dimension, like I was reading a philosophical cheat code. Instead, I was left staring at the last page thinking, Hmmmm?
And weirdly, that might be part of the point.
The Metamorphosis was my first encounter with Franz Kafka, and it felt like meeting a new, distant friend. A deeply anxious, slightly translucent friend. His confusion felt like mine. I couldn't stop reading—not just the story but about his life: how he wanted his work burned, how he died early, how he felt isolated and betrayed by just about everything.
I probably wasn’t supposed to read the book through those eyes. But I did.
And the ending? It doesn’t spare you. Like a lot of these dark little literary punches (The Heavenly Christmas Tree by Dostoevsky comes to mind), it leaves you wondering why the story was even told. There is a significant amount of alienation and isolation, along with feelings of absurdity and many unanswered questions. Kafka’s own struggles—his fraught family life, his mental health battles—are woven into his fiction, making his stories feel both intimate and unsettlingly relatable.
It’s as if some truths prefer to stay in the dark. And you’re left asking: Do I wanna know?
I haven’t made sense of it yet. But what I have made sense of—effortlessly, even—is this poem by Alice N. Persons:
Meadowbrook Nursing Home
On our last visit, when Lucy was fifteen
And getting creaky herself,
One of the nurses said to me,
"Why don't you take the cat to Mrs. Harris' room
— poor thing lost her leg to diabetes last fall —
she's ninety, and blind, and no one comes to see her."
The door was open. I asked the tiny woman in the bed
if she would like me to bring Lucy in, and she turned her head
toward us. "Oh, yes, I want to touch her."
"I had a cat called Lily — she was so pretty, all white.
She was with me for twenty years, after my husband died too.
She slept with me every night — I loved her very much.
It's hard, in here, since I can't get around."
Lucy was settling in on the bed.
"You won't believe it, but I used to love to dance.
I was a fool for it! I even won contests.
I wish I had danced more.
It's funny, what you miss when everything.....is gone."
This last was a murmur. She'd fallen asleep.
I lifted the cat
from the bed, tiptoed out, and drove home.
I tried to do some desk work
but couldn't focus.
I went downstairs, pulled the shades,
put on Tina Turner
and cranked it up loud
and I danced.
I danced.
This poem showed up in a weekly newsletter from Pádraig Ó Tuama, part of Poetry Unbound. In the same week I read Metamorphosis.
Sometimes, meaning doesn’t come from some grand revelation—it shows up in small, real moments. A poem. A song. A dance.
And in a week where nothing else made any damn sense—this did.
So, do you wanna know? Maybe not. But you do want to feel. And that, in the end, is what Kafka—and life—leave you with.
So just dance, I guess. In any way you know how.