<i>“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” </i><br><br>With this  startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, <i>The  Metamorphosis</i>. It is the story of a  young man who, transformed overnight into a giant  beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to  his family, an outsider in his own home, a  quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though  absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, <i>The  Metamorphosis</i> has taken its place as one  of the most widely read and influential works of  twentieth-century fiction. <br><br>As W.H. Auden wrote,  “Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man.”