Gogol’s The Overcoat and Kafka’s Metamorphosis Foreshadowed the Apple TV Hit Severance

Long before Severance turned corporate soul-splitting into Emmy bait, Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat quietly laid the groundwork for the genre of bureaucratic horror. Akaky Akakievich is the proto-Severed worker—his life split cleanly between a dead-eyed office existence and a home life that’s somehow even more depressing. Like the Lumon employees, Akaky finds solace not in human connection but in the numbing repetition of meaningless tasks—he copies documents with the same reverence others reserve for sacred texts. And when he finally dares to dream—by saving for a coat, not a promotion—his brief taste of identity is crushed under the weight of systemic cruelty. If Severance is about carving a clean boundary between work self and home self, The Overcoat is about never having had a self to begin with—just a threadbare shell, waiting for a little wool and meaning.

Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, like Gogol’s The Overcoat, is an early blueprint for Severance—a corporate fever dream where identity disintegrates under the crushing weight of routine. Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect, which is really just Kafka’s polite way of saying, “Congratulations, you’ve officially been dehumanized by your job.” Much like the Innies at Lumon, Gregor is trapped in a world where personal agency has been revoked and his worth is measured solely by productivity. His family, like a passive-aggressive middle manager, barely bats an eye as he spirals into irrelevance—because what matters isn’t who you are, but what you produce. Metamorphosis doesn’t just foreshadow Severance—it’s the spiritual prequel, complete with bug eyes, locked doors, and the existential dread of being rendered obsolete by the very system you once served.