Pryor has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and over twenty years experience in professional and creative writing with special interest in fiction. In the following essay, she compares the transformation of Ben in “The Rememberer” to that of Gregor Samsa in Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.”

Aimee Bender’s story “The Rememberer” centers on the transformation of the narrator’s lover from a man to an assortment of animals, as he de-evolves. Arguably the most famous story of such a transformation is Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” in which the main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning to discover that he has become a huge insect. Though Bender’s and Kafka’s writing styles are drastically different, the two stories share thematic similarities beyond the metamorphosis of...