Franz Kafka�s �A Country Doctor� is one of those stories that haunts you for a while even after you have finished reading it. On the surface, it appears to be a story of an elderly country doctor assailed by doubt and fear who feels that he is underappreciated by the community he serves. If you delve deeper into Kafka�s life and the time in which he lived, you find that there is far more to this story than what shows on the surface.
To understand the story, we must first know something of the man who wrote it. Kafka was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Prague at the time it was a capital in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father insisted on educating him in the German way, instead of the Czech, and young Franz often felt isolated and alienated from the world around him. Kafka knew he was expected to follow in his father�s footsteps, and he received his doctorate in law. Kafka decided against being a lawyer, however, and ended up working for an insurance company. He later retired because of tuberculosis, which ultimately killed him. (Witalec 1)
The character of the doctor is faced by several challenges, all of which prove to be quite frustrating to the elderly gentleman. The first frustration is, of course, the lack of a horse. His own horse having died from its exertions during a hard winter, his devoted little maid Rosa is out begging the villagers for the loan of an animal to take him to the side of the sick boy. Rosa returns without a horse, as the doctor expected. He kicks the unused pigsty and a man he doesn�t know emerges with two strange horses.
The Term Paper on Kafkas Metamorphosis
Kafka's Metamorphosis Franz Kafkas short story The Metamorphosis deals with a man who turns into some sort of insect, resulting in a conflict between the household and the transformed individual. Whether the man, Gregor Samsa, literally or figuratively turns into a bug is not known. The story is full of themes and symbols that Kafka uses to make his story as ambiguous, yet as comprehensible, as ...
This then leads into the second event that is very frustrating to the doctor. The groom helps hitch the horses, and then goes after Rosa. He bites her on the cheek and it�s obvious he won�t hesitate to rape her. The doctor gets very angry and challenges the man. As soon as he�s in the carriage, however, the groom slaps the horses� rumps and sends them running. The doctor hears the door to his house splintering and knows that Rosa is in danger. But he is unable to turn the horses around, or to stop them, and is required to leave Rosa behind. This is also very frustrating because the doctor feels very strongly his role as her protector.
The third frustration for the doctor is upon his arrival at the house, he sees a boy who doesn�t appear to be overly ill. He makes a quick diagnosis of the fact that he isn�t sick, just overly excited. Then at last he is shown the wound in the boy�s hip. The wound is infested with maggots and has festered long enough that there is no hope for him. The doctor feels frustrated because no one told him of the injury upon his arrival.
A fourth frustration for the doctor is a general theme that he mentions. He feels that he is not appreciated by the community he has been appointed to help. He has devoted his life to helping these people, and they turn to him instead of the priest for help. But he is underpaid, and treated with little regard by those he has helped.
�A Country Doctor� portrays the thought of the private and home life being at odds with the professional life. This is obvious when the doctor is torn by his duty to Rosa, and to the patient waiting for him. He wishes to stay and protect her from the stranger, for the man�s intentions to rape the poor girl are obvious from the start. But he is called by the requirements of his position in the community to attend to the sick. In the end, forces beyond his control drive him away while the groom kicks down the door.
This particular theme is also one that seemed to run through Kafka�s own life. As is stated in an article published in Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers, Volume 60, Janet Witalec and her team make mention that Kafka was �plagued by the discord between his vocation and literary ambitions and by his ambivalence about marriage, which he believed offered the greatest happiness, but which he feared would stifle his creativity.� (1) You can see this same fear in the elderly doctor, as he turns to protect Rosa but is driven away by the need to perform his duties.
The Essay on Kafkas Basteele
As presented by Franz Kafka, Karl Rossmann's life has a pattern of confinement. Kafka takes great pains to show us that Karl's reactions to nearly every instance of confinement neatly stems from one formative incident: Johanna Brummer's seduction of Karl. That one scandal seemingly affects how Karl reacts to every other attempt to confine him, who and what he allows to box him in, and his ...
Kafka�s Jewish heritage also plays a role in the story. Most notably is the event with the pigsty. Pigs are unclean animals according to the Jewish religion. So the groom and the two horses are most definitely not the most savory creatures. But the doctor has no choice. He has to accept the �help� given by these strange, fey creatures and their sinister groom. (Bernardo 1)
The narrative is given from the perspective of the doctor, who continuously blames others for what goes wrong in his life. This theme is evident in all of the excuses he makes to himself. He blames the groom for raping Rosa, when he refused to stay and help her. He says because of the interference of others for his inability to save the boy. He blames the horses for not getting him home fast enough when it�s his own reluctance to admit that he abandoned Rosa that is holding him back. (Gray 1)
This story could easily be considered a nightmare due to the surreal and mystical components: the appearance of the demonic groom and his spectral steeds, the attack on Rosa, the horses that run too quickly, etc. It can also be seen as a dissertation on the problems caused by a desire for a personal life over a professional one. However we look at it, Kafka�s �A Country Doctor� is a very evocative piece of fiction that draws us into a world we may not understand but at some deep, visceral level we can still relate to.
Bibliography
Bernardo, Karen. �Franz Kafka�s �A Country Doctor�.� StoryBites. 11/21/08 http://www.storybites.com/kafkadoctor2.htm
Gray, R. �Lecture Notes: Franz Kafka, �A Country Doctor�.� Freud and the Literary Imagination. 10/15/08 11/21/08 http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Doctor.Notes.html
Witalec, Janet. Ed. �Franz Kafka 1883-1924�. Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers. Volume 60 http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/kafka-franz
