> This surreal scenario is likely to have been inspired by a letter Kafka had sent to his father, who was deeply disappointed by his son’s sensitive, curious and artistic nature. Kafka believed that he failed to fulfil his father’s expectations of what it means to be a man and, thus, that he appeared in his eye to be no better than an insect.

Glad to see someone mention this as the link between the story and his father is actually quite strong and appears generally underappreciated by most. For context, Kafka was heavily dependent on his father and was made painfully conscious of the fact. His father would frequently mock him as weak and sickly (Kafka ultimately dies of tuberculosis), and his father's assistance (he helped get Kafka a well-paid sinecure in the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy which he later satirized in his work, most notably The Castle) must have been doubly humiliating. But interestingly enough this entire dynamic is reversed in The Metamorphsis -- there Gregor Samsa (nominally a parasite) is the breadwinner and his family have actually been sucking him dry. (Perhaps how Kafka felt about them emotionally?)

The first sentence of the Metamorphosis in German reads (emphasis mine):

> Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

(Or in English, "Gregor Samsa wakes up from a night of uneasy dreams only to find that he had been transformed into a gigantic insect")

Kafka's father used "Ungeziefer" to describe "parasites"/"blood-suckers", like a bed-bug, or a flea, and NOT a beetle or just any insect in general, which is how it's often incorrectly translated. (However, see Nabokov, LECTURES ON LITERATURE, pp258-60, where he argues (using entymology) that K is a large beetle). For evidence of this, see Kafka's use of it in Briefe an Milena (which is, incidentally, the only time he uses the word in those letters): "Von dem Riva-Ungeziefer bin ich noch zerbissen...", p.68: "I'm still covered with bites from the Riva-vermin..."). Thus in Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis), Kafka becomes an Ungeziefer literally, which is how he felt his father perceived him figuratively. In Brief an den Vater, Kafka ventriloquizes his father thusly:

> Und den Kampf des Ungeziefers, weliches nicht nur sticht, sondern gleich auch zu seiner Lebenserhaltung das Blut saugt. ...das bist Du. > > You have put it into your head to live entirely off me. I admit that we fight each other, but there are two kinds of combat. The chivalrous combat, in which independent opponents pit their strength against each other, each on his own, each losing on his own, each winning on his own. And there is the combat of vermin, which not only sting but, on top of it, suck your blood in order to sustain their own life.... and that's what you are.

--pp118-119 in The Schocken Kafka Library edition

The etymology of the word is evocative yields further insight into how Kafka may've perceived himself, or felt others perceived him (e.g. the end of the Trial):

> From early modern German ungeziffer, Ungezieffer, a variant form of Middle High German ungezibere. These pertain to Old High German zebar (“sacrificial animal”) and hence originally meant “animals unsuitable for sacrifice”, ultimately from Proto-Germanic *tībrą (“offering, sacrifice, victim”). The word is rarely attested in medieval texts due to suppression of words reminiscent of heathen practices, but must have survived in lower registers.

--https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ungeziefer