The most thoroughly cited paragraph EVER

The German-Jewish-Czech Kafka was famed for his portrayals of alienation and faceless bureaucracy. All of Kafka’s works are marked by an impressively created sense of hopelessness and an absence of a more optimistic future. Nowhere is the individual able to escape the authoritarian and hierarchal structures of family and society. In The Metamorphosis, protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a vermin. He tries to convince himself to feel normal, but his incomprehensible condition as an insect proves otherwise. The Metamorphosis is an allegorical tale, which means that the events symbolize a more general human condition in modern society and depict the "profound danger to humanity of the demands of bourgeois acquisitive life”. The reification of human relationships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century due to social and historical upheavals resulted in the general feeling of rootlessness and alienation among people. The fragmentation of society and life evoked a sense of inner anguish and anxiety. This culminated in the themes of loss, loneliness, and meaninglessness of life. Kafka belonged to this modern period of alienation and disorientation. His protagonists are, therefore, portrayed as estranged victims leading an Absurd life in a familiar yet a strange world. Applying the context of alienation to Kafka’s novella, we can view Gregor's transformation as an extended metaphor, carried from abstract concept to concrete reality: trapped in a meaningless job and isolated from the human beings around him, Gregor is thought of as an insect by himself and by others, so he becomes one. His vision of lonely individuals trapped in bureaucratic or legal labyrinths can be seen as a powerful metaphor for modern experience.