Welcome

Hello and welcome to a place where we can share our creativity, and our reinterpretations of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Before beginning you creative rewrite of the story there is some rules that you must adhere to. If you choose to rewrite the ending Gregor must remain alive in some capacity, and he must remain a dung beetle/insect who is the size of a human, and has a human mind. The key is to keep him alive, but also to resolve the story, and to bring it to some sort of conclusion.

If you decide instead to rewrite the beginning of the story Gregor must wake up as a different animal. This will highlight the importance, and grotesqueness of Kafka's dung beetle/insect to the story.

The minimum requirement for this exercise is a 1 page response, and the maximum is 3 pages. I'm hoping that most of you will fall somewhere in between. Good luck and create hell in your imagination.

Interview with Marc Estrin author of Insect Dreams: The Half Life Of Gregor Samsa

http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw020425marc_estrin

Above is a link to a interview with Marc Estrin who wrote a book called Insect Dreams:The half life of Gregor Samsa. In it Gregor remains alive at the end of the story and becomes part of a circus act. When the circus subplot runs its course and Samsa goes off to New York, he undergoes a radical transformation into a half-man, half-insect superhero whom the author uses to reexamine the first half of the 20th century He befriends historical figures like Charles Ives, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Robert Oppenheimer, as well as numerous other highly fascinating fictional characters. Gregor has an impact on the unfolding of world events as we remember them and others that never got recorded in history books, such as Roosevelt's refusal to interfere with the genocide of the Jews.

This is an incredibly inventive rewrite or continuation of the ending of The Metamorphosis. I think this will show you how Kafka's story inspires people to rewrite the ending and in Estrin's case get it published.