1 However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was.
2 And he could not knock himself out now at any price; better to stay in bed than lose consciousness.
3 And so he set himself to the task of swinging the entire length of his body out of the bed all at the same time.
4 Gregor only needed to hear the visitor's first words of greeting and he knew who it was - the chief clerk himself.
5 Now he let himself fall against the back of a nearby chair and held tightly to the edges of it with his little legs.
6 It was a simple matter to throw off the covers; he only had to blow himself up a little and they fell off by themselves.
7 One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.
8 But then he said to himself: "Before it strikes quarter past seven I'll definitely have to have got properly out of bed."
9 Once there he let go of it and threw himself onto the door, holding himself upright against it using the adhesive on the tips of his legs.
10 At the same time, though, he did not forget to remind himself that calm consideration was much better than rushing to desperate conclusions.
11 He told himself once more that it was not possible for him to stay in bed and that the most sensible thing to do would be to get free of it in whatever way he could at whatever sacrifice.
12 Gregor, however, had no thought of opening the door, and instead congratulated himself for his cautious habit, acquired from his travelling, of locking all doors at night even when he was at home.
13 He would have used his arms and his hands to push himself up; but instead of them he only had all those little legs continuously moving in different directions, and which he was moreover unable to control.
14 But when he had at last got his head out of the bed and into the fresh air it occurred to him that if he let himself fall it would be a miracle if his head were not injured, so he became afraid to carry on pushing himself forward the same way.
15 And while Gregor gushed out these words, hardly knowing what he was saying, he made his way over to the chest of drawers - this was easily done, probably because of the practise he had already had in bed - where he now tried to get himself upright.
16 The first few times he tried to climb up on the smooth chest of drawers he just slid down again, but he finally gave himself one last swing and stood there upright; the lower part of his body was in serious pain but he no longer gave any attention to it.
17 Whatever was said next would be crucial, so, in order to make his voice as clear as possible, he coughed a little, but taking care to do this not too loudly as even this might well sound different from the way that a human coughs and he was no longer sure he could judge this for himself.
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