The Metamorphosis is a novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect-like creature. This is not a horror story, but it is the story of the horror of a man who, asleep in bed in the family home, wakes to find that overnight he has turned into a beetle. He retains the mind and soul of a man but in his repulsive form the family confines him to the bedroom. The story is told entirely from the beetle's viewpoint—not so much in the 'first person' as in the 'first beetle'. He has to get up to go to work, he is the only wage-earner in the family; yet he cannot go, trapped in bed on his back, his little legs waving in the air. The vividness of the prose, even in translation, makes you feel that this would no doubt be exactly what it would be like for a man to live in the body of a beetle. Kafka's work has excited much critical comment from the literary world, who have published whole books discussing its symbolism.

卡夫卡的《变形记》中，沉重的肉体和精神上的压迫使人失去了自己的本质，异化为非人。推销员一觉醒来发现自己变成甲虫，尽管他还有人的情感与心理，但是虫的外形使他逐渐化为异类，变形后被世界遗弃使得他的心境极度悲凉。三次努力试图与亲人以及外界交流失败后，等待他的只有死亡。他的变形折射了西方人当时真实的生存状态。卡夫卡通过小说并不只是单纯阐述事实，而是抗拒这个世界，追寻人类人性的完善。