A heartwarming story about a man who is turned into a giant bug and loses his family, realizing at last that they don't need him and he is free to go. Unfortunately, he doesn't find a giant bug girlfriend, nor does he eat anyone alive.

edit: More seriously, this is a difficult short story to understand if you don't read very, very carefully. I'm usually not one for hidden meaning in texts as I like bluntness, but there are all sorts of details that will go over the average reader's head, such as the meaning of the woman in fur being a reference to the guy who the word 'masochism' is coined after. You also have to keep in mind the transformation of society's view of animal life - Darwin was still a relatively 'new' and big deal in philosophical circles, and metamorphosis was one of the ways of referring to evolution. The apple his father tosses at him is also a likely biblical reference, but in the most absurd and parodyic fashion - it is used as a weapon. The short story is full of satire - the way as a giant bug he insists he just wants to convince the manager to let him keep his job, while anyone could see chasing after him is terrifying and aggressive, the desire to 'protect' his sister after she plays music by keeping her locked in a room with a giant smelly and hideous insect, or the way it's implied that at his death he is literately as 2 dimensional as the page he is on and has become artwork , the one thing he cared about beyond work (if you can call a sexy image artwork), or a cartoon like the joke that this is... It's funny. Reading it with only in-text knowledge, there is quite a bit of depth here, but it requires you to have a dark sense of humor and the ability to imagine how much being a salesman/worker beholden to an abusive boss sucks and how society expects men to be the sole caregivers of their entire family even though their family could actually survive without them by taking on jobs themselves. If you don't get this, you likely won't understand a single thing. It's no wonder so many people gave it a poor review, it can be difficult to understand and it is incredibly dark humor. My absolute favorite part is how when he dies from what is essentially suicide, he doesn't resent his family in the slightest, while they resented him horribly. It's the perfect touch and very unique, you don't see too many novels that capture that kind of misery or aspect of the human condition (ironic since he is a bug, but I digress). It is the kind of thing that if you don't get it, the novel absolutely won't explain it to you at all, but if you do get it, it means a lot. In fact, that's what edged over to being my favorite work of fiction. There is a secondary metamorphosis, which the very end paragraph makes clear by being solely about it: that of the female character Greta, who becomes a bread winner. Greta, coincidentally, is very close to the name Gregor. It is very easy to make a trans reading of this story, but just as easy to read it in a half dozen other ways: twisted biblical, political satire, Darwinian sympathy for other creatures, horror, the craving for the warmth and comfort of one's bed and a life idle and free of gravity and the tiring effort of having to get out of it to bath and eat and dress and go to work. So in short, it's something short that speaks a lot in a multitude of ways, often about things that are usually forbidden to speak about and can in some societies only be alluded to by metaphor. This is a story about a man turning into a bug. But it also really isn't at all. But to be honest if it were only about turning into a bug and dying near-happily, bitter-sweetly, I would still like it. Like Kafka, I, too, have daydreamed of transformation into a giant insect.