The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (Oxford World's Classics)
Franz Kafka
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0199238553
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis. Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony examines questions of power, justice, punishment, and the meaning of pain in a colonial setting. These three stories are flanked by two very different works. Meditation, the first book Kafka published, consists of light, whimsical, often poignant mood-pictures, while the autobiographical Letter to his Father analyzes his difficult relationship with his father in devastating detail. This new translation by Joyce Crick pays particular attention to the nuances of Kafka's style, and the Introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson provide guidance to this most enigmatic and rewarding of writers. There is also a Biographical Preface, an up-to-date bibliography, and a chronology of Kafka's life.
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collapsed, surrounded by her outspread skirts, her face sunk and quite hidden in her breast. His father clenched his fist with a hostile expression, as if meaning to drive Gregor back into his room, but then he looked uncertainly round the living-room, covered his eyes with his hands, and wept so that his mighty breast shook. Gregor made no attempt to enter the room now, but leaned against the other, firmly bolted, wing of the door on the inside, so that all there was to be seen of him was half
ready for duty and waiting here too for the voice of his superior. Consequently his uniform, which hadn’t been new in the first place, began to look less clean and tidy, despite the care mother and daughter gave it, and Gregor would often gaze for entire evenings at this coat with its many, many stains and its gold buttons radiant from constant polishing, which the old man wore as he slept—in discomfort but at peace. As soon as the clock struck ten, the mother would try to wake the father,
relationship to one’s fellow-men was crucial—and so, in my case, fatal. You were closer to the mark with your dislike of my writing and of what, unbeknown to you, was connected with it. Here I had in fact escaped from you some little way by my own efforts, even if it did rather remind me of the worm whose tail had been trampled by a foot, but tears itself free and drags itself aside with its front. I was relatively safe; I was able to breathe again; for once, the dislike which of course you
his boot-soles’ (p. 58). Kafka’s father was a big man, and Kafka, in a letter to Felice of 20–1 January 1913, describes his father’s family as ‘strong giants’. 23 our dear mother: this curious expression implies that Georg’s father thinks of his late wife as his mother as well as Georg’s. 24 to deny him to you at least twice: perhaps alluding to Peter’s threefold denial of Jesus (Mark 14). 25 Russian revolution: that of 1905, in which the priest Father Gapon played a
7 On these matters, see now Iris Bruce, Kafka and Cultural Zionism: Dates in Palestine (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). 8 James Joyce, letter to Grant Richards, 5 May 1906, quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 218. 9 Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Franz Kafka, “The Metamorphosis”’, in his Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 251–83 (pp. 258–60). 10 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers