As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning out of restless dreams, he found himself in bed, transformed into a gargantuan pest. He lay on his hard, armored back and saw, as he raised his head a little, his domed, brown belly, divided into arched segments; he could hardly keep the bed sheets from sliding from his stomach's height completely to the floor. His numerous legs, lamentably thin in comparison to his new girth, flickered helplessly before his eyes.
“What has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being (albeit a little too small), lay still between the four familiar walls. Above the table, upon which a collection of sample cloth goods was spread out in stacks—Samsa was a traveling salesman—hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. It depicted a woman who, with a fur hat and a fur boa, sat erect, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm had disappeared.
Gregor's glance then turned to the window, and the dreary weather—one heard raindrops falling upon the window ledge—made him quite melancholy. “How would it be if I kept sleeping for a little while longer and forgot all this foolishness,” he thought; but this was entirely impractical, for he was accustomed to sleeping on his right side, and in his present circumstances, he couldn't bring himself into this position. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again into a prone position. He tried it a full hundred times, closing his eyes because he had to avoid seeing the wriggling legs, and gave up trying when he began to feel a slight, dull pain in his side that he had hitherto not felt.
“Oh God,” he thought, “what a strenuous occupation I've chosen! Always on the road, day out, day in. The rigors of the job are much greater than if I were working locally, and, furthermore, the nuisances of traveling are always imposed upon me—the worries about train connections, bad meals at irregular intervals, fleeting human contact that is ever-changing, never lasting, and never expected to be genuine. To the devil with it all!” He felt a slight itching on the top of his abdomen. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bedpost so that he could lift his head more easily, found the itchy area, which was entirely covered with small white spots—he did not know what to make of them—and wanted to feel the place with a leg. But he retracted it immediately, for the contact felt like a cold shower all over him.
