feels guilty after achieving his freedom.

The novel begins on a clear note of surrealism when the narrator says,

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

Certainly, such a description is bizarre and creates an off-putting connection between dreams and reality, between the conscious and the unconscious. With his transformation, a link between what has been happening within Gregor's head, even prior to the book's beginning, and the reality outside his head has been forged. Gregor has been feeling like "a tool of the boss," like someone who is relatively insignificant and little valued, despite how hard he works and his feeling that he has no real life outside of his work. In short, his status as a worker in a capitalist economy had already made Gregor feel like vermin, and now his physical body has transformed to match his mental state (or he has become so convinced of his status in his own mind that he has merely convinced himself that his body has transformed — a possibility which seems, somehow, sadder). Thus, Kafka uses surrealism to critique capitalism and the deleterious effects it has on workers.

Surrealism is a good term to apply to Kafka’s work, because etymologically it means “above realism.”  In the early 1920’s artists and writers experimented with alternates to realism, the prevailing mode prior to World War I.  Surrealism is often referred to as “literature in the dream state,” where a different kind of logic (or non-logic) prevails (as we all experience when we dream disjointed but strangely detailed events).  If we remember that Georg Samsa wakes up “from a restless sleep” to discover that he has taken on an exo-skeleton “beetle-like” shape, we see that Kafka is inverting the relationship between so-called “reality” and the dream-state.  The key to understanding this reversal is remembering that strange dreams come from “anxieties” that cause “restless sleep”.   In the 17th century Spanish Calderon wrote a play entitled Life is a Dream (La Vida es Sueno) in which such a role reversal is manufactured, to make the same point—that our daily “logical” life could be a dream.  Georg Samsa “wakes” into the surrealistic dream world where apples stick in his casing, etc.  Kafka is using this surreal device to question the assumed cause-effect “essence” (as opposed to the “existence precedes essence” idea of existentialism) of life.  If you read the whole story as a recital of a dream Samsa is having, you will be much enriched by the layers of narration Kafka handles here.

The word surreal is an adjective used to describe things that are strange or freakish, things that seem unreal or uncanny and hard-to-believe. It has an eerie and unnatural connotation, and so surreal things often feel off-putting and confusing and even upsetting. Therefore, the opening event of the novel—when Gregor Samsa wakes up and discovers that "he had been changed into a monstrous vermin"—can certainly be considered surreal. In fact, "surreal" almost feels like a bit of an understatement! The narrator goes on to describe Gregor's strange, bug body: the hard shell that covers his back, his many little legs that seem to wriggle uncontrollably while he lies on his back, and so on. His family's relatively tacit acceptance of Gregor's new shape can also be called surreal. They are upset about his alteration, to be sure, but they try to live with him and even meet his needs, at least for a while.