Gregor Samsa, an unhappy travelling salesman, awakens one morning to discover he has transformed into a hideous beetle-like insect. Once his family and employer discover his regrettable condition, he’s left alone, confined to his room, unable to communicate with anyone and left to contemplate his life as the lives of his family go on without him.

One of Franz Kafka’s most enduring and most studied works, The Metamorphosis remains a quintessential tale about a man alienated and outcast, and it is through his strange and unexplained transformation, that Gregor contrasts the absurdity of his situation with philosophical contemplation of isolation and impotency.

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. 

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. 

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.