The first lines of a work are important. They get the piece moving, they set the tone for the work, they introduce us to the authorial voice. Think of some of the most memorable first lines.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”[1]

“Call me Ishmael.”[2]

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”[3]

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”[4]

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis has a great first line: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.” No hemming or hawing, no long, convoluted setup, no backstory, just—BANG. There it is. Gregor wakes up and he’s a bug. And the rest of the novella proceeds in the same, straightforward tone of that first line.

That’s part of the appeal and the annoyance of Kafka’s short work. The narrator never explains how or why Gregor has been turned into a bug; he just simply asks us to come along on this strange journey into a life that otherwise seems very firmly grounded in reality. We, as readers, are drawn in because we can’t help but wonder what is going to happen to this poor man-turned-bug. (And let’s admit it, we are hoping that eventually we will discover the reason for Gregor’s transformation. Disappointment awaits us on that front.)

The further we read, the more we are drawn into Gregor’s life and relationships, which we quickly learn amount to not much at all. His long, grueling work hours prevent him from having a real life. His relationships are confined to his family, and those aren’t that good. Gregor’s life as a bug is even more confining and isolating than his life as a human, and we watch Gregor fade as his family moves on with their lives, no attempt ever made to understand him or connect with him in his bug form.

I realized as I read Gregor’s strange tale that I kept waiting to see a glimmer of hope somewhere in the shadows of the Samsa family apartment. Where is hope for Gregor in the endless and relentless weight of his work as a travelling salesman? Where is hope for the family’s situation—saddled with debt because of a business failure years ago? Where is hope for the family’s relationships with one another that seem so fractured and superficial? And always as I read, where is hope that Gregor will be able to reverse the transformation he has experienced?

The answer to all these questions is unsatisfying because the most straightforward answer is there is no hope. At least not the kind of hope that exceeds our most common substitution for the word: want. So many of our daily “hopes” are little more than wants: “I hope the weather is nice for the barbecue tomorrow” or “I hope the store has the shoes I’m looking for.” Against this shallow kind of hope is a more substantial hope that fuels our deepest longings. Karen Swallow Prior defines this kind of hope as, “something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain.”[5]

With each new scene or conversation in The Metamorphosis, I sense that this kind of hope is lacking. Kafka is notorious for creating complex and confusing circular systems in all his works, but even if you are reading without that knowledge, it doesn’t take a literary scholar to notice that there is no hope for Gregor at his job. He has been slaving away for several years for this company without a vacation, without a commendation from his managers, without managing to repay the loan he has taken on for the sake of his family. And when he has the misfortune to wake up as a bug, his manager is immediately at his house checking in on him to find out why he didn’t show up for work.

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Hope seems missing in the family’s situation as well. We learn that the Samsa family has a father, a mother, and a teenage daughter, in addition to Gregor. The debt which the family has incurred is due to some business failure of Gregor’s father. And while the novella paints him as a man still able to work, he is instead broken by his failure and spends his days in the family apartment in his bathrobe. Both the mother and sister seem to have adjusted to the confines of their situation, so it seems as if the family has given up hope that things will improve for them.

Maybe the most delicate area to discuss is Gregor’s family relationships. Between Gregor’s long work hours, the father’s disinterest in the life happening around him, the mother’s superficial concern for everyone’s wellbeing, and the sister’s immature self focus, it doesn’t seem possible for this family to deepen their care for one another. And when, as a bug, Gregor is unable to communicate with his family, all hope seems to fade that this family will emerge from this event stronger and more unified.

The lack of hope is perhaps the most realistic and heartbreaking aspect of Kafka’s work. Readers have tried for a couple of generations to see the deeper meanings that lay beneath the words on the pages of this story. And while all of those are fascinating to consider, they overlook a simpler and more straightforward reading of the novella. We humans are hard-wired for hope, and we have all heard countless stories of people who do amazing things because of hope and in spite of horrific circumstances. Gregor’s tragic tale is a stark picture of what happens when people lose hope.

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[1] Genesis 1:1.

[2] Moby Dick by Herman Melville.

[3] Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

[4] A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

[5] Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2018), 123.