"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, <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  inadequecy, guilt, and isolation, <i>The  Metamorphosis</i> 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."