Later, the head clerk arrives at the Samsa flat to investigate Gregor’s tardiness, at the moment of his tardiness. Even if Gregor’s absence from work was judged grave enough to send the head clerk himself, the event remains absurd. Somehow, the head clerk would have had to foresee Gregor’s lateness and taken an early train to show up at the flat just minutes after Gregor should have been at his office desk.

In “A Country Doctor,” the sudden, ominous appearance of the groom is punctuated by his mysterious knowledge of the maid’s name and his tacit intent to ravish her. Following this, the doctor is whisked away in his newly harnessed trap, as if beyond his control, completely unable to assist his maid, who locks herself in the house: “I hear my front door splinter and burst as the groom attacks it, and then my eyes and ears are swamped with a blinding rush of the senses. But even this lasts only a moment, for, as if my patient’s courtyard opens just outside my gate, I am already there” (p. 124). The ten-mile distance between the doctor’s village and his patient’s house, the reality that precipitated the need for strong horses in the first place, evaporates.

Nightmare-turned-reality is the power of “The Metamorphosis.” Gregor Samsa is a different animal, a unique figure even among canonical supernatural tales. Without the permanence of Gregor’s monstrous form, we would be left with something like the absurd comedy of Gogol’s “The Nose,” in which Kovalyov’s nose leaves his face to prance about the town disguised as a state councillor but in the end returns to its proper place unchanged. Without Gregor’s inimitable subjectivity, we would be left essentially with the horror of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the painting of Dorian becomes monstrous while Dorian himself remains ageless, until the fey moment when the two destroy each other, leaving only a moral behind.

Instead, we arrive at a story that cannot claim the supernatural as one of its elements. The mystery of “The Metamorphosis” emerges in one of the most famous, and most variously translated, lines in Western literature—its first: “As Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin” (p. 7). This is marvelously funny. Instead of waking up from a nightmare, Gregor wakes up into one. Reality, the only balm for bad dreams, is significantly less reassuring when you wake up hideously disfigured. But in Kafka’s fiction, the rational and the irrational intertwine menacingly. Often these irrational elements spring from the minds of his characters and manifest themselves physically. Ideas are metamorphosed into reality, with little effort on the characters’ parts. Here Gregor’s idea, originating in his “unsettling dreams,” has followed him into the real world. The echo and confirmation of this reality comes in the second paragraph: “It was no dream” (p. 7). Unlike Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who, after transforming several times, wakes up, Gregor’s most bizarre adventure is real, and has only just begun.

Kafka treats the bed, representative of both illness and idleness, as the birthplace of these irrational ideas. The first sentence introduces Gregor not only in his nightmarish form but also ensnared in his bed, as if caught in the grips of tangling irrationality. Gregor spends most of the first section of “The Metamorphosis” trying to extricate himself from his bed: “in bed he could never think anything through to a reasonable conclusion” (p. 9). In viewing the chaos of his legs waving in the air, Gregor tells himself “that he could not possibly stay in bed and that the logical recourse was to risk everything in the mere hope of freeing himself from the bed” (p. 10). By escaping, he hopes to shut out the irrationality of his new form and return to his old self. We learn that Gregor was unrelentingly reasonable as a human; the head clerk booms through the door, “I have always known you to be a quiet, reasonable man and now you suddenly seem to be indulging in rash eccentricities” (p. 14). For a brief second, Gregor even entertains simply sleeping it off (p.