by Caroline Dalzell

Created on: April 06, 2009

A Country Doctor is an intense story of a doctor attending to an emergency. It starts with a description of the agitations of the doctor as his horse has died overnight, heavy snow lies on the ground with more falling, and his servant girl Rose cannot find any villagers willing to lend him a horse for the visit. It then descends into abstract bleakness: the groom who mysteriously appears out the pigsty after the doctor kicks its door in sheer frustration and his terrible intentions towards Rose; the patient, a young boy who is seemingly well but it then transcends has a fatal and diseased flesh wound; the doctor's destiny at the end of the book. Kafka does not offer the reader escapism; A Country Doctor is no exception.

In the nightmarish situation the doctor finds himself in, he is presented with challenges both tangible and intangible. The four main trials for the doctor, however, are winter, the groom, the patient and himself.

The doctor is tense and anxious at the start of the book. The short, sharp, broken sentence structure serves to highlight his frustration and as you read the opening seven lines, you can sense him pacing, back and forth, back and forth. He is unwilling to help himself, though, and is portrayed as ineffective. It is Rose, the servant girl, who is busy searching for a replacement horse for him while he worries: "...but it was hopeless, I knew it, and I stood there forlornly...of course, who would lend a horse at this time for such a journey?" Even when his luck unexpectedly turns after he kicks the pigsty door in frustration he "did not know what to say". Again, it is Rose who deals with the situation by making a joke and relieving the tension. Later on, when he is with the patient and fretting about Rose's fate, he decides he needs to return as the horses have somehow become loose but he has no conviction and he permits the patient's sister "to take my fur coat from me". And it is not long before he "yields" and drinks from the rum he has been given.

He has not even the strength of conviction to check his patient properly. He had already decided the young boy was fine before confirming "what I already knew; the boy was quite sound". He is blinded by his broken spirit and believes the boy asked him to let him die because he is apathetic and disinterested in life. He is eaten up by the sacrifice he has made by choosing between Rose and the patient, and by the ingratitude of his patients generally "the whole district made my life a torment

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