Elation with Citation!

"What an exhausting job I've picked on! Traveling about day in, day out... there's the trouble of constant traveling, of worrying about train connections, the bed and the irregular meals..."

In the first chapter of Kafka's novella, The Metamorphosis Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself turned into a giant insect. Instantly, the reader is plunged into Kafka's bizarre world where fantasy and reality are one. In doing so, Kafka warns us to find meaning (in our lives) aside from work.

Gregor has been a traveling salesman living with his parents and younger sister, and has been their sole source of support. He ran too hard to meet the demands of business and ultimately, by overworking, he resembles a parasite. He is transformed, through workaholism, to embody the popular notion that a salesman is a scurrying bug. The young traveling salesman who was pushed around and looked down on by his boss turns into the beetle he feels himself to really be.

Exhausting himself as a provider, Gregor becomes a non-entity. The Samsas all scurry with the ambition that Gregor formerly displayed, but Gregor can now scurry only across the floor. At the beginning of the third chapter, Gregor's parents and sister are paying less and less attention to him and more and more to their own misfortune. At the end of the story a charwoman removes the flat husk of Gregor's body after his death. His family members, rejuvenated by their release from him, look forward to their new lives.

While the Samsa's depended on Gregor as sole support, they trapped him into workaholism, through which he succumbed to an irreversible illness. He worked like an unconscious bug for his family (this wouldn't link for some reason: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/191095/kafkas_metamorphosis_resonates_90_years.html?cat=38), and eventually became just that.