About the Metamorphosis

by Elisabeth Fuchs and Harald Salfellner

It really is an exceptionally nasty story...

Franz Kafka 

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The Idea for The Metamorphosis

When Franz Kafka awoke one morning from his troubled dreams, he found himself in his bed – no not transformed into a monstrous insect, but with an idea in his head that would not let him go.

Franz Kafka around 1910.

That was on the 17^th November 1912, a Sunday. Kafka lay in bed and wondered what it would be like to wake up, lying on an armour-plated back, with countless legs, flickering helplessly in the air. He probably also felt, like Gregor Samsa, incapable of getting up, after all, he had sat up until far into the night over his novel Der Verschollene (The Missing), while feeling that it was “very much the worse for it”.1 As well as this, he had been waiting in vain for days for a letter from his girlfriend, Felice Bauer, and was determined “not to stir from his bed until the letter came”.2 The postman finally delivered the longed-for letter around midday and Kafka answered Felice on the evening of the same day. In the final sentence of his reply, he mentions that he will “write down a little story that came to me during my misery in bed, and which is tormenting me most deeply”3 that very day – the first allusion to The Metamorphosis.

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Notes

1. Franz Kafka on 17.11.1912 to Felice Bauer, in: Franz Kafka: Briefe 1900–1912 (Letters 1900–1912), ed. by Hans-Gerd Koch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 241 (hereafter Br I).

2. Franz Kafka on 17.11.1912 to Felice Bauer, in: Br I, p. 240.

3. Franz Kafka on 17.11.1912 to Felice Bauer, in: Br I, p. 241.