Kafka Bug: I woke up like this

A finely drawn giant insect lying in an old-fashioned bed, next to the line “I woke up like this.” It is Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, who wakes one morning transformed into a monstrous creature – and whose first worry is being late for work. The design turns that nightmare into a deadpan morning mood.

Travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into a huge insect. Unable to work and support his parents and sister, he is hidden in his room, first pitied, then resented. The novella, written in 1912 and published in 1915, is about alienation, guilt, work and how quickly a family's love depends on usefulness.

Kafka never says. The German original calls him an ungeheueres Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin, and the charwoman calls him an old dung beetle. While the first book edition was being prepared in 1915, Kafka wrote to his publisher that the insect itself must not be drawn on the cover – not even from a distance. Nabokov later argued he is a large beetle, not a cockroach.

In the classic English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir – “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” It is one of the most famous opening sentences in world literature, because the catastrophe happens before the story even begins.

Kafkaesque describes situations that are nightmarishly absurd, bureaucratic and impossible to escape, where an individual faces an incomprehensible system calmly treated as normal. The word comes from Kafka's novels The Trial and The Castle and stories like The Metamorphosis, where the strangest events are told in a flat, matter-of-fact tone.

There is no single key, and Kafka gave none. Common readings see it as a story of alienation in modern work life, of a son who exists for his family only as a breadwinner, of illness and dependency, or of an outsider's self-loathing. What makes it modern is that no one asks why the transformation happened – only how to cope.

Wounded by an apple his father throws and barely eating, Gregor grows weaker after his sister declares that the creature has to go. He dies quietly in the night. The family feels relieved, takes a tram trip into the countryside and plans a smaller flat and a husband for the daughter – a bleak, almost cheerful ending.

A German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague (1883–1924) who worked by day at a workers' accident insurance institute. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts; Brod published The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) instead. Kafka was not a philosopher, but existentialists such as Camus discussed him in The Myth of Sisyphus.

For literature students and teachers, book clubs, German studies fans and anyone who has ever felt slightly less than human on a Monday morning. The design comes as a T-shirt, women's T-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker.