The Metamorphosis By Franz Kafka (1915)

er thrown immediately after that one drove into Gregor’s
back really hard. Gregor wanted to drag himself off, as if
the unexpected and incredible pain would go away if he
changed his position. But he felt as if he was nailed in place
and lay stretched out completely confused in all his senses.
Only with his final glance did he notice how the door
of his room was pulled open and how, right in front of his
sister (who was yelling), his mother ran out in her undergarments,
for his sister had undressed her in order to give
her some freedom to breathe in her fainting spell, and how
his mother then ran up to his father, on the way her tied up
skirts one after the other slipped toward the floor, and how,
tripping over her skirts, she hurled herself onto his father
and, throwing her arms around him, in complete union
with him—but at this moment Gregor’s powers of sight gave
way—as her hands reached to the back of his father’s head
and she begged him to spare Gregor’s life.
III
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G regor’s serious wound, from which he suffered for over
a month (since no one ventured to remove the apple, it
remained in his flesh as a visible reminder), seemed by itself
to have reminded the father that, in spite of his present
unhappy and hateful appearance, Gregor was a member of
the family, something one should not treat as an enemy, and
that it was, on the contrary, a requirement of family duty to
suppress one’s aversion and to endure—nothing else, just
endure. And if through his wound Gregor had now apparently
lost for good his ability to move and for the time being
needed many many minutes to crawl across this room, like
an aged invalid (so far as creeping up high was concerned,
that was unimaginable), nevertheless for this worsening of
his condition, in his opinion, he did get completely satisfactory
compensation, because every day towards evening the
door to the living room, which he was in the habit of keeping
a sharp eye on even one or two hours beforehand, was
opened, so that he, lying down in the darkness of his room,
invisible from the living room, could see the entire family
at the illuminated table and listen to their conversation, to
a certain extent with their common permission, a situation
quite different from what happened before.
Of course, it was no longer the animated social interaction
of former times, about which Gregor in small hotel