It won’t take you an entire afternoon to read one of the great short stories of our time. All you need is an hour and a little curiosity—and if that curiosity is even the slightest bit entomological, even better for you.
Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is the brief but impactful tale of a traveling salesman who awakes one morning to find he’s been transformed into a giant insect. Kafka uses this literal dehumanization as a vehicle to explore some of the thorniest parts of the human condition: rejection, betrayal, social isolation, and emotional dehumanization.
So profound is Kafka’s footprint that he’s one of the few authors whose name is used as an adjective. And were it not for the man who famously chose to defy Kafka’s wishes by not burning every piece of his unpublished work, we wouldn’t be talking about him the same way today.
Join us as we unpack the best short story of all time, and consider this unhinged collection of quotes from the episode a teaser.
- “Guess I’m a bug now, well shit!”
- “No haiku is gonna get you out of being a cockroach if you’re actually a cockroach!”
- “I would have done much poorer as a giant dung beetle over the course of four months in this condition.”
- “Somewhere between 15 minutes and all night is your problem…for how long you have to take care of your brother cockroach.”
And is non-bug musings:
- “What’s your relationship to smelling salts?”
- “Half a Xanny on Tuesdays and Kafka is a completely different guy.”