The Metamorphosis

　　〈蛻變〉中的主角，願意為家人付出一切，然而，在他們眼中，他只是隻蟲，他便以蟲的形象無助的死去了。〈判決〉中的主角全心全意愛著父親，然而，父親對於他將結婚極度不滿，惡意辱罵詆譭他，甚至判決他應該淹死，他便真的投入河中絕望的死去了。

作者簡介

法蘭茲．卡夫卡（Franz Kafka，1883-1924）

　　猶太裔捷克人，一生幾乎沒有離開過布拉格。他生前默默無聞，死後成為西方現代主義的重要作家，後世的「存在主義」、「荒謬劇」、「魔幻寫實」、「法國新小說」等文學藝術流派，都是從卡夫卡的書寫中獲得啟發與養份。

　　他的作品充滿幻奇與荒誕、孤獨與沉鬱；他筆下的人們走在彷若夢境的困頓中，不但探求、尋找出路，卻依然沉淪到生命的最底層。

　　他生前交代要將作品燬盡，幸虧摯友馬克思沒有遵照遺言，還替他發表了作品，才讓全世界因卡夫卡而有了改變。

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin."

With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing--though absurdly comic--meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."

Franz Kafka was born in 1833 to a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family. His father, the self-made proprietor of a wholesale haberdashery business, was a domineering man whose approbation Franz continually struggled to win. The younger Kafka’s feelings of inadequacy and guilt form the background of much of his work and are made explicit in his ＂Letter to His Father＂ (excerpted in this volume), which was written in 1919 but never sent. Kafka was educated in the German language schools of Prague and at the city’s German University, where in 1908 he took a law degree. Literature, however, remained his sole passion. At this time he became part of a literary circle that included Franz Werfel, Martin Buber, and Kafka’s close friend Max Brod. Encouraged by Brod, Kafka published the prose collection Observations in 1913. Two years later his story ＂The Stoker＂ won the Fontaine prize. In 1916 he began work on The Trial and between this time and 1923 produced three incomplete novels as well as numerous sketches and stories. In his lifetime some of his short works did appear: The Judgment (1916), The Metamorphosis (1916), The Penal Colony (1919), and The Country Doctor (1919). Before his death of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka had charged Max Brod with the execution of his estate, ordering Brod to burn the manuscripts. With the somewhat circular justification that Kafka must have known his friend could not obey such an order, Brod decided to publish Kafka’s writings. To this act of ＂betrayal＂ the world owes the preservation of some of the most unforgettable and influential literary works of our century.