當你站在我面前，看著我，你哪裡知道我心中的苦，而我又哪裡知道你心中之苦。假如我撲倒在你的面前，向你泣訴，你能知道我多少？一如你對地獄能知道多少，就算有人告訴你地獄炙熱又可怕。就只為了這個緣故，人在面對彼此時就該像站在地獄入口一樣心存敬畏、深思而慈悲。
-----Die Verwandlung , Franz Kafka 變形記
Kafka wrote "The Metamorphosis" at the end of 1912, soon after he finished "The judgment," and it is worth noting that the two stories have much in common: a businessman and bachelor like Georg Bendemann of "The judgment," Gregor Samsa is confronted with an absurd fate in the form of a "gigantic insect," while Georg is confronted by absurdity in the person of his father. Also both men are guilty: like Georg in "The judgment," Gregor Samsa (note the similarity of first names) is guilty of having cut himself off from his true self — long before his actual metamorphosis — and, to the extent he has done so, he is excluded from his family. His situation of intensifying anxiety, already an unalterable fact at his awakening, corresponds to Georg's after his sentence. More so than Georg, however, who comes to accept his judgment, out of proportion though it may be, Gregor is a puzzled victim brought before the Absolute — here in the form of the chief clerk — which forever recedes into the background. This element of receding, an important theme in Kafka's works, intensifies the gap between the hero and the unknown source of his condemnation. Thus the reader finds himself confronted with Gregor's horrible fate and is left in doubt about the source of Gregor's doom and the existence of enough personal guilt to warrant such a harsh verdict. The selection of an ordinary individual as victim heightens the impact of the absurd. Gregor is not an enchanted prince in a fairy tale, yearning for deliverance from his animal state; instead, he is a rather average salesman who awakens and finds himself transformed into an insect.
In a sense, Gregor is the archetype of many of Kafka's male characters: he is a man reluctant to act, fearful of possible mishaps, rather prone to exaggerated contemplation, and given to juvenile, surrogate dealings with sex.
Time being so related to movement, Gregor's increasing lack of direction and continuous crawling around in circles finally result in his total loss of a sense of time. When his mother and sister remove the furniture from his room in the second part of the story, he loses his "last guideline of direction." Paradoxically, "The Metamorphosis" is enacted outside the context of time, and because of this, time is always frightfully present. As Kafka put it in an aphorism, "It is only our concept of time which permits us to use the term 'The Last judgment'; in reality, it is a permanent judgment."
Gregor is doomed without knowing the charges or the verdict, and all he can do is bow to a powerful Unknown. And this is all the reader can do. Following the narrator, he can view all angles of Gregor's torment. Not one person within the story can do that, Gregor included. They are all shut off from seeing any perspective other than their own. This is their curse. There is no textual evidence in the story which explicitly tells us the cause of Gregor's fate. But because we too suffer from the sense of aloneness that Gregor does and because Kafka calls on us to share Gregor's tribulations with him, we discover that his experiences are analogous to our own.
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