As many of you know, I recently had the great honor of receiving a fellowship from the Franz Kafka foundation for my doctoral thesis “RT@Kafka: Forschungen eines Hundes In The Digital Age,” in which I analyzed Kafka’s work to extrapolate what he would think about Twitter were he still alive. Obviously I was thrilled to receive such a sizable grant, allowing me to expand my research to cover Foursquare and J-Date as well, but for a Kafka scholar such as myself, the most exciting aspect of the fellowship was access to the great man’s personal papers.

Last month I flew to Prague and was allowed to roam freely across the Kafka estate and let me tell you- to sit where Mr. Kafka penned Ein Bericht für eine Akademie, to drink tea where he wrote Der Jäger Gracchus, to eat a PB&J where he researched Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande- the feeling was indescribable. But by far, the most exciting moment was reading an early draft of Kafka’s unparalleled classic of existential horror The Metamorphosis.  With permission of the Kafka estate, I would like to now reproduce the first page of this never before seen draft. As you will no doubt see, it is very different from Mr. Kafka’s final, published version, but it is in my mind no less powerful. Enjoy.

                                      The Kegamorphosis

                                                     By

                         Frankie Kafka, aka “Raw Dawg Assasin”

One morning, as Stoney Greggson was waking up from a raging hangover, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous keg of Bud Light Lime. He lay on his metal-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his smooth, stainless steel stomach divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the snuggie, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His tap and spigot, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

The fuck happened to me? he thought. It was no dream. His room, a normal room in the Tri Delt frat house, only rather too small, lay quiet within its four familiar walls. Above the table on which a powerpoint about PF Chang’s was laid out—Greggson was a food management major—hung the poster which he had recently bought online and put in a frame he found in front of his house. It showed a lady, with a fur hat on and a fur stole and nothing else, the good stuff obscured tastefully by a cartoon of a horny devil.

Stoney’s eyes turned next to the window, and the overcast sky—one could hear raindrops beating against the beer pong table on the porch—made him quite bummed out. What about passing out a little longer and forgetting all this bullshit, he thought, but it could not be done, for he was accustomed to sleep on his right side, facing his TV so he could fall asleep to Family Guy, and in his present condition he could not turn himself over. However violently he forced himself toward his right side he always rolled onto his back again. He tried it at least a hundred times, shutting his eyes to keep from puking from the motion, and only desisted when he began to feel in his side a faint dull ache he had never felt before.
 

Oh God, he thought, what an exhausting major I’ve picked out for myself! Class at eleven, three days a week. College is so much more of a pain then just getting a job at his step-dad’s landscaping company, and on top of that there’s the headache of being frat president, of worrying about sounding like a homo because his high-pitched voice, the shitty beer and microwave burritos, hot new pledges at the sister sorority he can never quite seal the deal with. Man, fuck it all! He felt a slight itching up on his beer gut, slowly pushed himself on his back nearer to the top of the bed so that he could lift his head more easily, identified the itching place which was surrounded by sharpie drawings of cocks that had been drawn on him in his sleep and was about to touch it with the tap, but drew the spigot back immediately, for the contact made a cold shiver run through him.