Kafka�s A Country Doctor is a grim tale of an elderly rural surgeon who, facing his own mortality, has a vivid nightmare filled with hopelessness and fear. It has a depressing theme of youth and vitality versus age and depletion.
The doctor faces numerous challenges in this short story. First, he must travel ten miles in a blinding snowstorm in the dark of night to the home of an ill patient. Worse still, his horse has just died, and he must find another horse to take him to his destination. After the doctor discovers a groom and horses in an abandoned pigsty, he must deal with the certainty that, if he leaves the groom behind, his servant, Rosa, will be raped. Both of these predicaments anger him, as he is powerless on his own to fix them. Next, as the physician learns shortly after arriving at his destination, the boy whom he has been called there to treat, although not mortally wounded, tells him that he wants to die. Finally, he must struggle to return to his home after treating the patient, despite his nakedness and the fact that the horses are moving in dreamlike slow motion through the freezing night. As the story progresses and these two new challenges emerge, the narrator becomes calm and cool-headed, recognizing the pointlessness of his despair.
Kafka�s story is nightmarish in its futility, as is the problem with most nightmares. Not simply is the doctor persecuted, but he can�t do anything about the arbitrary forces which he encounters. The sudden appearance of a groom and his other-worldly horses, the groom�s attack upon Rosa, the worms – with limbs � crawling out of the wound of the patient, and the doctor�s being stripped of his clothing by local families and town elders and then sung a haunting chorus by school children appearing, it seems, out of thin air, are all examples of the physician�s horrific dream.
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Doctors' Listening Skills When people go to the doctor's office they want the doctor to listen. Competency and a correct diagnosis are appreciated too, but more than anything, patients value doctors's i lence (Richards, 1407). In addition, patients want "more and better information about their problem and the outcome, more openness about the side effects of treatment, relief of pain and emotional ...
The predominant theme in the story is death. The physician is nearing the end of a life that has been fruitlessly spent trying to help the sick and dying. The story ends with the doctor, naked and cold, going slowly with the horses through the �snowy desert like old men.� (Kafka).
The doctor now faces the death that so many of his patients have faced. Yet, unlike his patients, there is no one to help him; he is instead betrayed and abandoned by them. He has used his last breath to help a young man who, unlike himself, is not dying, yet chooses death over life. The narrator realizes he has made a huge blunder � by helping others he has been left in solitude to face his own death, and has himself abandoned and betrayed the woman he left at home.
The tale conveys the physician�s feelings of loneliness and lack of control, not only in his role as physician but also as a man. He has been unable to prevent the groom from attacking Rosa, who sought safety by running into the doctor�s home, locking the doors and turning off the lights. The narrator believes he cannot protect those close to him, even those in his own home � because he must spend his time helping strangers seeking his medical assistance, people he has also often been unable to truly help. Although he is frustrated by his own shortcomings, it has been suggested that the physician blames others, not himself, for his failures: the boy does not want to live, the doctor has no horses, and even the groom, initially a savior, has failed him. (Gray, 2).
Interlinked with the themes of the doctor�s fear of impending death and his powerlessness is his disappointment in his frequent failure to cure his patients, coupled with the patients� unrealistic expectations of him. The ill boy�s family assumes the doctor will make him well, and the mother looks at the doctor disappointingly for not doing more. The narrator feels he is expected to perform feats beyond his capabilities, proven when he does not notice the patient�s gaping wound in his first examination.
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The story also addresses man�s inability to be an objective and realistic observer of his own fate. The doctor is treating a young man with a loving family and, although he has an injury (possibly self-inflicted) it is apparently not life-threatening. The patient insists that he wants to die, although, as the physician tells him, the boy�s condition is far less serious than that of others he has seen. As he tells the young man, the doctor has witnessed all degrees of sickness and death. In his experience, his patients �offer their side and hardly hear the axe in the forest,� refusing to either recognize the futility of their plight, or to appreciate what they do have, �to say nothing of the fact that [the axe] is coming closer to them.� (Kafka).
All the doctor can do, metaphorically and literally, is write prescriptions; he cannot change peoples� beliefs concerning their plights.
There are also strong sexual overtones in this story. Indeed, the tale is Freudian in its sexual imagery (including the muscular, powerful horses and Rosa and the boy�s rose-shaped wound), and has been described as �a story written as though in response to Freud.� (Benjamin 45).
After examining the patient, the doctor is stripped naked by the townspeople, and dragged into bed next to the ill young man, who himself is shirtless. Even when the physician makes his hasty departure, he travels naked through the night. Earlier in the story, the groom savagely bites Rosa on her face, and the obvious implication is that she will be raped. His �rose� has been tarnished, leaving the physician feeling powerless and utterly alone as he is carried toward his death by a pair of ghostly horses.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Jessica, The Primal Leap of Psychoanalysis from Body to Speech: Freud, Feminism, and the Vicissitudes of the Transference, in Storms in Her Head, eds. M. Dimen, A. Harris, Other Press, LLC, 2001.
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The medical profession has been around since the beginning of mankind. It most likely started with women who were warm-natured and nurturing from tribes. Amazingly, we have advanced all the way to professional physicians and many other careers in the field of medicine. Although not actual laws, medical ethics are strict guidelines that most professionals follow. Health professionals most follow ...
Gray, Richard, Freud and the Literary Imagination, Lecture Notes: Franz Kafka, �A Country Doctor,� University of Washington, German 390/Comp. Lit 396, Autumn Quarter, viewed 24 Nov. 2008,
Kafka, Franz, The Country Doctor, Twisted Spoon Press, 2002 (page unknown).
