You have value in society as long as you can provide, or else you’re thrown away. Jobs provide a false sense of purpose and a distraction. The metamorphosis represented what he was going through. We live in an absurd world, where woe and happiness live next to each other. Gregor changed and no one cared. They lived off Gregor. Who really is the bug? Is it individuals such as Gregor or society itself. “The Metamorphosis” is a tragedy, that if the shoe fits, you would terribly weep over.

Holding this book for the first time sent a terrible pang in my gut: it has been celebrated as one of the foremost works of the century, and yet the man who wrote it died thinking of himself a failure. As the book progressed, the feeling didn't exactly go away, it just kept changing reasons. The meekness that kafka describes, which until I read this book, I thought of as an emotion unique to me, manifests more truly in some of the relatively inconsequential episodes of the story. For example, when Gregor hopes that his sister notices that he hasn't drunk the milk, and brings something else for him to eat. It took enormous strength to keep my eyes on the words, and not to convulse at the embarrassed, guilty pain that Gregor goes through at that moment. Metamorphosis is a book you read with your whole body, and the social location that it inhabits. I imagine that it strikes a different chord with every reader. In my case, it was my battles with the notions around masculinity, among other things. Reading it, you realise that in different instances you have been both Gregor and his family. You emerge out of the room afterwards as the person wanting to be more kind; someone that Kafka really needed when he was alive. I almost wish that he never had to write it.