Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works Of Literature

In which I shamelessly stand on the shoulders of the giants who came before me by inserting Dick Allen’s name into various works representative of the Western Canon, thus adding to those various works the patina of blessedness.

Today’s episode: Dick Allen awakes one morning from uneasy dreams and finds himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily pushed shut, bolted, and locked. The sudden noise in his rear startled him so much that his little legs gave beneath him. It was his sister who had shown such haste. She had been standing ready waiting and had made a light spring forward, Dick Allen had not even heard her coming, and she cried “At last!” to her parents as she turned the key in the lock.

“And what now?” said Dick Allen to himself, looking around in the darkness. Soon he made the discovery that he was now unable to stir a limb. This did not surprise him, rather it seemed unnatural that he should ever actually have been able to move on these feeble little legs. Otherwise he felt relatively comfortable. True, his whole body was aching, but it seemed that the pain was gradually growing less and would finally pass away. The rotting apple in his back and the inflamed area around it, all covered with soft dust, already hardly troubled him. He thought of his family with tenderness and love. The decision that he must disappear was one that he held to even more strongly than his sister, if that were possible. In this state of vacant and peaceful meditation he remained until the tower clock struck three in the morning. The first broadening of light in the world outside the window entered his consciousness once more. Then his head sank to the floor of its own accord and from his nostrils came the last faint flicker of his breath.

This has been the latest installment of Inserting Dick Allen’s Name Into Works of Literature.