The metamorphosis - Franz Kafka

"When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from
unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his
bed into a monstrous vermin." With this
startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first
sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The
Metamorphosis. 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
inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, The
Metamorphosis has taken its place as one
of the mosst widely read and influential works of
twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote,
"Kafka is important to us because his predicament
is the predicament of modern man."