The Metamorphosis Summary

The Metamorphosis is a novella divided into three parts, each marking a stage in Gregor's decline:

Structure at a glance

• Part I. Gregor wakes transformed and is discovered by his family and his employer
• Part II. Gregor adjusts to life as an insect while his family adapts to losing his income
• Part III. Boarders arrive, the family's patience runs out, and Gregor's fate is sealed
• Gregor's perspective. Much of the novella follows his thoughts and dwindling humanity
• The aftermath. The final pages shift to the family's response to his death

Each of the three sections ends with a confrontation that pushes Gregor further from his family.

This summary of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka opens with one of literature's most startling first lines: Gregor Samsa awakes one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant, monstrous insect. Rather than panicking about the impossible change itself, Gregor frets about practical matters, that he has overslept and will miss his train, and how he will keep supporting his family, revealing how thoroughly his life has been consumed by his dreary job as a traveling salesman.

Gregor struggles to move his new body and eventually opens his door, horrifying his family, his mother, father, and beloved sister Grete, and his employer's chief clerk, who flees. His father drives him back into his room. In the days that follow, the family must adjust to the loss of Gregor's income and the presence of the creature he has become. Grete initially takes on the role of caring for him, bringing food and cleaning his room, and Gregor retains his human thoughts and feelings even as he grows more insect-like in habit.

As told in this The Metamorphosis summary, the family's situation deteriorates. Each member is forced to find work, and their resentment of Gregor deepens. In a painful incident, Gregor's father, enraged, pelts him with apples, one of which lodges in his back and festers, gravely wounding him. Gregor becomes increasingly neglected: his room is used for storage, his care declines, and he is treated less as a family member and more as a shameful burden.

To make ends meet, the family takes in boarders. One night, drawn out by Grete's violin playing, Gregor creeps into the living room and is spotted by the horrified lodgers, who threaten to leave without paying. This is the final straw. Grete, exhausted and repulsed, declares that the creature can no longer be Gregor and that the family must get rid of it. Overhearing this, Gregor, weak, wounded, and understanding that he has become an unbearable burden, retreats to his room, setting up the novella's quietly devastating conclusion.

The Metamorphosis ends with Gregor's lonely death and his family's disturbing sense of relief. After overhearing his beloved sister Grete insist that the family must get rid of the "creature," that it cannot really be Gregor, he accepts that his continued existence is only causing his family pain. Wounded by the festering apple lodged in his back, weak, and starving, Gregor retreats to his room. There, thinking of his family "with deep emotion and love" and convinced that he must disappear, he quietly dies before dawn.

The charwoman discovers Gregor's shriveled body the next morning and cheerfully disposes of it. Rather than grieving, the Samsa family, Gregor's mother, father, and sister, feels an overwhelming sense of relief. They dismiss the boarders and the charwoman, and take the day off to go on an outing into the countryside together.

In the novella's jarring final scene, the parents notice that Grete has blossomed into an attractive young woman, and they begin, hopefully, to think about finding her a husband. Their thoughts turn entirely to their own bright future, with Gregor already forgotten. The conclusion of this summary of The Metamorphosis is deliberately unsettling: Gregor's self-sacrificing death is met not with mourning but with liberation, underscoring the novella's bleak themes of alienation, the fragility of family love, and the ease with which a person can be discarded once he is no longer useful.

Here are some of the most famous quotes from The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, in the classic Muir English translation. These verbatim lines capture the novella's absurdity, alienation, and pathos:

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

"He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister's."

"Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath."

These The Metamorphosis quotes are widely studied because they capture the novella's shocking opening, Gregor's selfless acceptance of his fate, and the quiet, haunting moment of his death.