Chapter I · I

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armor-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head a little, his vaulted brown belly, divided by arched corrugations, on top of which the coverlet, ready to slide off completely, could hardly keep its place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin compared with the rest of his bulk, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

“What has happened to me?” he thought. It was not a dream. His room, a proper human room, though a little too small, lay quietly between its four familiar walls. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of fabric samples was spread out—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and fitted into a pretty, gilded frame. It showed a lady who, equipped with a fur hat and fur boa, sat erect and raised toward the viewer a heavy fur muff into which her entire forearm had vanished.

Gregor’s glance then turned toward the window, and the dreary weather—one could hear raindrops striking the window sill—made him quite melancholy. “What if I went back to sleep for a little while and forgot all this foolishness,” he thought, but that was completely impracticable, for he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he was unable to get into that position. No matter how much force he threw into rolling onto his right side, he always rocked back onto his back. He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes so as not to see the wriggling legs, and desisted only when he began to feel in his side a faint, dull ache he had never felt before.

“Oh God,” he thought, “what an exhausting profession I have chosen! Day in, day out on the road. The strains of business are far greater than in the actual office at home, and on top of that, there is this burden of traveling imposed on me, the worries about train connections, the irregular, bad meals, human contact that is ever-changing, never lasting, never becoming warm. The devil take it all!” He felt a slight itch on the upper part of his belly; slid slowly on his back closer to the bedpost so as to be able to lift his head better; found the itchy spot, which was covered with lots of small white dots he did not know how to interpret; and wanted to touch the place with one of his legs, but drew it back immediately, for at the touch he was wafted by cold shivers.

He slipped back into his former position. “This early rising,” he thought, “makes one completely witless. A man must have his sleep. Other travelers live like harem women. When I, for example, go back to the inn in the course of the morning to copy out the orders I’ve secured, these gentlemen are only just sitting down to breakfast. I ought to try that with my boss; I’d be thrown out on the spot. Who knows, though, whether that might not be the best thing for me. If I weren’t holding back on my parents’ account, I would have quit long ago; I’d have walked up to the boss and told him my opinion from the bottom of my heart. He would have had to tumble from his desk! It’s a strange habit, too, to sit upon the desk and talk down from the heights to the employee, who, moreover, has to step right up close because of the boss’s hard hearing. Well, hope is not entirely given up yet; once I have the money together to pay off my parents’ debt to him—it might take another five or six years—I’ll do it without fail. Then the great clean break will be made. For now, however, I must get up, for my train leaves at five.”

And he looked over at the alarm clock, which was ticking on the chest. “Heavenly Father!” he thought. It was half past six, and the hands were calmly moving forward; it was even past half past, it was already approaching a quarter to seven. Could the alarm clock have failed to ring? One could see from the bed that it was properly set for four o’clock; it had certainly rung, too. Yes, but was it possible to sleep quietly through this furniture-shaking ringing? Well, he had not slept quietly, but probably all the sounder for that. But what should he do now? The next train went at seven; to catch it, he would have to rush frantically, and the sample collection was not packed yet, and he himself did not feel particularly fresh and agile at all. And even if he caught the train, a reprimand from the boss was inevitable, for the errand boy had waited at the five o’clock train and had reported his absence long ago. He was a creature of the boss, without backbone or sense. What if he called in sick? But that would be extremely awkward and suspicious, for in his five years of service Gregor had not been sick a single time. The boss would surely come with the health insurance doctor, would reproach his parents for their lazy son, and cut short all objections by referring to the health insurance doctor, for whom there are only ever completely healthy but work-shy people anyway. And besides, in this case, would he be so completely wrong? Apart from a drowsiness that was truly superfluous after such a long sleep, Gregor actually felt quite well and even had an exceptionally hearty appetite.

As he was considering all this in greatest haste, without being able to bring himself to leave the bed—the alarm clock had just struck a quarter to seven—there came a cautious knock at the door by the head of his bed. “Gregor,” a voice called—it was his mother—“it’s a quarter to seven. Didn’t you want to catch your train?” That gentle voice! Gregor was startled when he heard his own voice in reply, which was unmistakably his former one, but into which, as if from below, an irrepressible, painful squeaking mingled, leaving the words intact in their clarity only for the first instant, so as to destroy them in the resonance in such a way that one could not tell whether one had heard correctly. Gregor had wanted to answer in detail and explain everything, but under the circumstances restricted himself to saying: “Yes, yes, thank you, Mother, I’m getting up now.” Owing to the wooden door, the change in Gregor’s voice was probably not noticeable outside, for his mother was reassured by this explanation and shuffled away. But through this brief exchange, the other family members had become aware that Gregor, contrary to expectation, was still at home, and already his father was knocking at one of the side doors, feebly, but with his fist. “Gregor, Gregor,” he called out, “what’s the matter?” And after a little while he urged again with a deeper voice: “Gregor! Gregor!” At the other side door, however, his sister lamented softly: “Gregor? Are you unwell? Do you need anything?” Toward both sides Gregor replied: “I’m almost ready,” striving, by means of the most meticulous pronunciation and by inserting long pauses between individual words, to strip his voice of anything conspicuous. The father returned to his breakfast, but the sister whispered: “Gregor, open up, I implore you.” But Gregor had no intention of opening the door; instead, he praised the cautious habit he had acquired from traveling, of locking all doors at night, even at home.

First of all, he wanted to get up quietly and undisturbed, get dressed, and above all have breakfast, and only then consider what to do next, for—as he well realized—in bed his thinking would come to no sensible conclusion. He remembered having often felt some slight ache in bed, perhaps produced by lying awkwardly, which, once he stood up, turned out to be pure imagination, and he was eager to see how his present impressions would gradually dissolve. That the change in his voice was nothing other than the harbinger of a severe chill, an occupational ailment of traveling salesmen, he did not doubt in the least.

Throwing off the quilt was quite simple; he needed only to puff himself up a little and it fell of its own accord. But beyond that, things became difficult, especially because he was so extraordinarily broad. He would have needed arms and hands to raise himself; instead, he had only the numerous little legs, which were in incessant, varied motion and which, moreover, he could not control. If he wanted to bend one, it was the first to stretch itself out; and if he finally succeeded in making this leg carry out what he wanted, all the others meanwhile worked, as if set free, in the greatest, most painful agitation. “Just don’t linger uselessly in bed,” Gregor said to himself.

First he wanted to get out of bed with the lower part of his body, but this lower part, which by the way he had not yet seen and of which he could form no clear idea, proved too difficult to move; it went so slowly; and when at last, driven almost wild, he gathered all his strength and thrust himself recklessly forward, he had misjudged his direction, struck violently against the lower bedpost, and the burning pain he felt taught him that the lower part of his body was perhaps precisely the most sensitive at the moment.

He therefore tried to get the upper part of his body out of bed first, and cautiously turned his head toward the edge of the bed. This was easily accomplished, and in spite of its breadth and weight his body mass at last slowly followed the turn of the head. But when he finally held his head out of bed in the open air, he became afraid to advance any further in this manner, for if he ultimately let himself fall like that, it would take nothing short of a miracle for his head to escape injury. And at this moment of all times he must not lose consciousness at any price; he would rather stay in bed.

But when, after the same effort, he lay there again, sighing as before, and once more saw his little legs struggling against one another, perhaps even more furiously, and found no way to bring calm and order into this chaotic flailing, he told himself once again that he could not possibly remain in bed and that the most sensible thing was to sacrifice everything if there was even the slightest hope of freeing himself from the bed by doing so. At the same time, however, he did not forget to remind himself from time to time that calm, indeed the calmest, deliberation was far better than desperate decisions. At such moments he fixed his eyes as sharply as possible upon the window, but unfortunately little confidence and cheer were to be drawn from the sight of the morning fog, which shrouded even the other side of the narrow street. “Seven o’clock already,” he said to himself as the alarm clock struck anew, “seven o’clock already and still such a fog.” And for a little while he lay quietly, breathing faintly, as if he perhaps expected the complete silence to bring about the return of real and natural circumstances.

Then, however, he said to himself: “Before it strikes a quarter past seven, I must have left the bed completely, no matter what. Besides, by then someone from the office will surely come to ask after me, for the office opens before seven.” And he now set about rocking his body out of bed along its entire length with complete uniformity. If he let himself fall out of bed in this way, his head, which he intended to lift sharply as he fell, would presumably remain uninjured. His back seemed hard; nothing would likely happen to it in the fall onto the carpet. His greatest concern was the thought of the loud crash that it was bound to make, and which would probably arouse, if not terror, then at least anxiety behind all the doors. Yet it had to be risked.

When Gregor was already projecting halfway out of bed—the new method was more of a game than an exertion, he needed only to rock himself in jerks—it occurred to him how simple everything would be if someone came to his aid. Two strong people—he thought of his father and the maid—would have been quite sufficient; they would only have had to slide their arms under his arched back, peel him out of the bed in this way, bend down with their burden, and then merely wait patiently and carefully for him to swing himself onto the floor, where his little legs would then hopefully find a purpose. Well, quite apart from the fact that the doors were locked, ought he really to have called for help? Despite all his distress, he could not suppress a smile at the thought.

He had already reached the point where, rocking more violently, he could scarcely keep his balance, and very soon he would have to make his final decision, for in five minutes it would be a quarter past seven—when the doorbell rang. “That is someone from the office,” he said to himself, and almost froze, while his little legs danced only the more frantically. For a moment everything remained quiet. “They are not opening,” Gregor told himself, clinging to some senseless hope. But then, of course, as always, the maid went with firm steps to the door and opened it. Gregor needed only to hear the visitor’s first word of greeting to know at once who it was—the chief clerk himself. Why on earth was Gregor condemned to serve in a firm where the slightest oversight instantly aroused the greatest suspicion? Were all the employees scoundrels without exception; was there not among them a single loyal, devoted person who, if he had failed to turn even a couple of morning hours to the firm’s account, would be driven mad by pangs of conscience and utterly unable to leave his bed? Was it really not enough to send an apprentice to inquire—if indeed this questioning was necessary at all—did the chief clerk have to come in person, and did the whole innocent family have to be shown that the investigation of this suspicious matter could be entrusted only to the wisdom of the chief clerk? And more as a result of the agitation into which Gregor was thrown by these reflections than through any deliberate resolution, he swung himself out of bed with all his might. There was a loud thud, but not a proper crash. The fall was muffled somewhat by the carpet, and his back was more elastic than Gregor had thought, which accounted for the not especially striking dull sound. Only his head he had not held carefully enough, and had banged it; he turned it and rubbed it against the carpet in vexation and pain.