by Alec Hemphill

Created on: September 30, 2009

Analysis of Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor

A Country Doctor by Franz Kafka is a chilling tale about a doctor who is summoned in the middle of the night to assist a gravely ill young man. It is written in a stream of consciousness style, as most Kafka is, and includes all the makings of a nightmare. What is important to note in this story, however, is the relation between Kafka's fictional characters and how they reflect his personal life and human despair as a whole.

Called upon late in the night, the difficulties and mental anguish suffered by the doctor become almost immediately apparent. Upon realizing his horse has died overnight, the doctor implores his faithful housemaid Rose to search the town for someone with a horse to lend, as the patient's house is some ten-miles in the distance. It seems that all hope is lost, as the doctor expects that no one will afford him a horse at these hours when a man referred to only as the groom offers up two mighty steeds with a carriage in tow. As the doctor is nearly ready to make way, he witnesses the bachelor force himself upon his housemaid, but rather than stay to assess and disarm the situation, he allows the steeds to carry him off as the screams of his housemaid echo through the winter night. It is here that we see the first solid allusion to Kafka's personal life, as well as the lives of many others.

Twice it happened that Kafka skipped the altar on his proposed wedding day, both times with the same woman. It could be said that Rose is the characterization of his would-have-been wife, and that the horse-and -carriage is the comparison to his obsessive devotion to following the call of duty, whatever the trade, be it doctor or writer. The Bachelor can be viewed as the idea of adolescent-like sex-driven debauchery in society, something Kafka regularly speaks about with an air of discontent.

Kafka's closest friend and the publisher of all his post-mortem literature, Max Brod was quite keen on the reasons behind Kafka's difficulty with commitment in marriage. He believed that Kafka had the idea that writing and professionalism in the male-dominated world of Prague in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were all-important, and should supersede all things emotional. It is made clear in many of Kafka's writings, and primarily in A Country Doctor, that while the characters are under emotional anguish and toiling over all matters of the heart, they do not falter in their ability to put on a stoic faade

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