Metamorphosis is the Catcher in the Rye of surrealist World War I fiction: the narrator is a mess, the main character is a stand in for the author, and it focuses a nearly bizarre amount of its time into animal symbolism. The first line ("When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.") presents itself as an objective, factual, observation, even though it's not actually or factual ; it simply makes use of ambiguously worded description. It establishes the use of narratorial third person, but it's a third person that seems farcical in its usage throughout the story. Gregor clearly exists as a stand-in for Kafka himself and no amount of distancing through point-of-view
