I first read The Metamorphosis because my friend said I should. That’s usually not a good reason to read something, but I’m glad I did. And I'm thinking a lot about absurdism lately. Not the Camus-style “life is meaningless and that’s the point” version, but something more practical. The kind you feel when you wake up, scroll through your feeds, then go make breakfast. Your brain is toggling between economic collapse, genocide, job applications, and that one email you keep forgetting to answer. The world is ridiculous. But it’s a familiar kind of ridiculous. So you keep moving.

That’s also the emotional architecture of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

It begins with one of the most famous openings in literature, and it doesn’t bother to ease you in:

“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

Just like that - No buildup. No origin story. Kafka isn’t interested in why Gregor became a bug. He’s more concerned with what happens next.

And what happens is deeply unnerving — not because of some horror, but because of how ordinary everything feels. Gregor, a traveling salesman with a miserable job, doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He worries about being late to work. His first instinct is obligation.

There’s a kind of tragic hilarity in that. You’ve just been transformed into an insect — and your boss is mad that you didn’t show up on time.

Genius lies here: the absurd isn’t the transformation itself, but the reaction to it. Nobody — not Gregor, not his parents, not his manager — asks how or why. And yes, the family is stunned but only briefly. Then, the calculus shifts. Gregor can no longer earn a living, so he is no longer valuable. He becomes an inconvenience, then a burden.

His father assaults him. His sister feeds him at first, then avoids him. Eventually, the whole family pretends he’s not even human. “I will not utter my brother’s name in front of this monster,” Grete says. That’s his sister.

Gregor, in a final act of internalized guilt, simply withers and dies. Not with drama, but with quiet resignation. The family? They’re quite relieved.

It’s a short book. You could finish it within an hour. But it lingers. The prose is simple — almost clinical — but the emotional effect is cumulative. It doesn’t pull you in with suspense or spectacle. It slowly corrodes your assumptions about normalcy.

That corrosion is what stayed with me.

A man turns into a bug and the world moves on. No riot, no epiphany. Just paperwork, resentment, silence. This isn’t science fiction, not even metaphor in the traditional sense. Kafka’s world is ours, except for one impossible thing. And the rest follows horrifyingly rational rules.

Student trap

A lot of people approach The Metamorphosis like a puzzle. Whether Gregor is a symbol of capitalism’s dehumanization, a victim of modern family dynamics, metaphor for immigrant alienation, disability, Jewish identity in 20th-century Europe(?)...

The answer is yes. And no. And more.

Kafka doesn’t tell you what to think. He just presents a world where something nonsensical happens, and everyone behaves as if it’s the most logical thing. Finding layers is part of the appeal. But trying to “solve” Kafka like a crossword clue, you’re going to miss something fundamental.

Reading Kafka is more like debugging a strange piece of software. The system is broken, but not in a way that crashes. You know what I mean.

Why I keep coming back

I’ve read The Metamorphosis multiple times now, first was when I was 17, but until now it still surprises me. I don’t mean in terms of plot — there’s not much of it. I mean in how it reflects whatever I’m trying to work through at the time.

First I see it as a story about labor. Second about isolation. Lately, I see it as some kind of a warning. Not about turning into a roach, but about the kinds of lives people accept without question. About how absurdities easily pass as normal.

Kafka doesn’t give you answers. He gives you a situation. He opens a trapdoor and invites you to look. And if you’re honest with yourself, what you see might be closer to home than you expect.

There’s no tidy ending. No big revelation. Just a man, a bug, a family that forgets him, and a society that never noticed.

And maybe that’s the point.