One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

"What's happened to me?" he thought. It wasn't a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.

Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad. "How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense", he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn't get into that position. However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was. He must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that he wouldn't have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before.

Basic set-up:

Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of Kafka's story, wakes up to find himself transformed into a bug. Creepy.

Franz Kafka wrote this story a few decades before Magic Realism became a thing, but it's been an inspiration to the Magical Realist writers who came after him. In this story, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself turned into an insect—and no, it's not a dream. Everything is frighteningly real.

So what's going on? Well, the story never explains how this transformation took place. It just happens. It's totally weird and crazy and unexpected, but hey, strange stuff happens in when you venture into the world of Magic Realism.

Even though the narrator is describing some pretty extraordinary things here, the tone is totally deadpan. It's not like, "Oh my God! Gregor Samsa woke up and found himself turned into a disgusting BUG! I can't believe it!"

Nope: the narrative voice is very matter-of-fact; it's understated; it doesn't try to even explain how this transformation took place. It's all like, "Hey, Gregor Samsa's got 99 problems, and being turned into a cockroach is just one like any other."

To heighten the sense of realism, Kafka gives us a lot of concrete detail about Gregor's new bug body: "He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. […] His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked."

By immersing us in so much detail, the narrator forces us to accept that what's happening as real, even if it seems crazy. This is one way that Magic Realist writers get us to believe the unusual events they describe as fact.