The Metamorphosis

Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman whose wages keep his parents and younger sister, cannot rise for work. His voice thins to something no one understands, and he learns to move on the ceiling and hide beneath the sofa. His sister Grete takes charge of feeding him and clearing his room; his father drives him back with blows. Over weeks the household rearranges its rooms, its money, and its patience around the shut door.

For the consulting room it holds a body that has turned foreign and repellent between one sleep and the next, and a self that keeps tracking train timetables and rent while its form revolts everyone near it. Gregor goes on worrying about the family's finances and Grete's music lessons as their tending curdles into revulsion. The story follows how care is rationed by disgust, how a household assigns and then withdraws the work of looking after him, and how shame settles into hiding, covering, and growing smaller.