Gregor Samsa

Gregor Samsa is the protagonist of Franz Kafka's 1915 novella The Metamorphosis, a traveling cloth salesman who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect. Trapped in his room and unable to work or communicate normally, Gregor watches his family's initial concern curdle into disgust, shame and finally neglect as he becomes an unbearable burden on the household he had previously supported financially, his own residual human feelings of guilt and concern for his family surviving longer than his physical humanity does. Kafka's flat, unsettling narration of an absurd premise treated with total matter-of-factness made Gregor's transformation one of the central images of twentieth-century literature, a byword for alienation, dehumanization and the individual crushed by family and economic obligation. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/