Our Resident Cockroach

One morning as Gregar Samsa was waking up, he “discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug [ungeheuer].” This is the opening line of a short story named Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. If you have read the story, you might have read Gregor had been changed into a “cockroach,” a “beetle,” or, a “gigantic insect.” Whatever way ungeheuer is decoded, Gregor has morphed into a huge thing, a nasty creepy-crawly thing. Gregor was a traveling salesman. He wandered from city to city.