Reaction Paper on Franz Kafkas’ A Country Doctor

Franz Kafkas’ A Country Doctor is a nightmarish story full of challenges and frustrations. The story is about a doctor who, because of his dedication to his job and duty to humankind, had to go through a lot of difficulties and make some sacrifices. The doctor went through a lot of challenges and these gave him some feelings of frustration. The doctor can be said to have woken up on the wrong side of the bed because of the losses on his own part – his servant girl, Rosa; his flourishing practice – all because he had to answer the call of a dying man.

The first challenge the doctor faced was that of the unending harsh weather. There was a severe snowstorm standing between him and his destination ten miles away. The icy winter was also a cause of his horse’s death. The doctor’s feelings of frustration were evident when he commented thus, “Naked, abandoned to the frost of this unhappy age, with an earthly carriage and unearthly horses, I drive around by myself, an old man.” The doctor’s response to the cold weather was to wrap himself in a coat of fur, although he had to discard this on his return journey when he had to quickly escape from the house of his patient.

The doctor’s second challenge was that of transportation. After meeting the frost challenge headlong and overcoming it, he could not go anywhere. This was because the cold icy winter had resulted in the death of his horse. Now, there was no other horse for him to use. His carriage was just as useless. His servant girl, Rosa, had to run around the village to see if she could help the doctor borrow a horse, but alas, could get none. He demonstrated his frustration when “distracted and tormented, he kicked his foot against the cracked door of the pigsty which had not been used for years.” However, his problem of transportation was solved when out of the pigsty crawled a team of two powerful horses which the groom hitched up to the doctor’s wagon.

The groom posed another challenge to the doctor. The intention of the groom was to exchange his animals with the doctor’s servant girl. The emergence of the groom with his animals from the pigsty was, to the doctor, a kind of God-sent solution to his problem at that point. When the groom’s intention became known to the doctor, the doctor could not do much. He was indeed helpless. All he could do was to cry out “You brute” in fury. Then the doctor’s attention was shifted from Rosa to the ‘beautiful team of horses’. Unknowingly, he climbed into the carriage happily, but before he could do anything to rescue Rosa, he was bounded out of the scene. His frustration was evident when his thoughts returned to Rosa throughout the remainder of the story.

Another challenge faced by the doctor was that of how to manage his patient’s condition. His inability to immediately discover his patient’s sore fully demonstrated his incompetence as a physician. Upon his arrival at the house of the patient, he was received with open hands and large expectations. The father gave him a glass of rum, the sister helped him to remove his fur coat, the mother enticed him, all in order for him to save their dying son and brother. Yet, he had to disappoint them due to his incompetence.

A nightmare has been defined by Psychology Today as "a dream occurring during....sleep that results in feelings of inescapable terror, fear or extreme anxiety" (Stephens). This story by Franz Kafkas can well be described has a nightmare because it, in its entirety, fulfills the conditions for the definition. The doctor in this story demonstrated feelings of anxiety when he said that he “couldn’t see what to do” about the condition of his patient. In the course of the story, the doctor described himself as being tormented, demonstrating his feelings of terror, fear and anxiety. Also, some pieces of the story are things that cannot happen in real life, except in a dream. Examples are the emergence of big, powerful horses out of the pigsty; horses peering through the open window of the invalid; the family removing the clothes of the doctor, leaving him naked.

One of the themes of this story, as indicated by Kafkas, is opportunism. Opportunism, as defined by Wheeler, refers to taking advantage of a person’s situation for purposes of personal advancement (112). This was exactly what happened between the groom and the doctor. The groom knew that the doctor needed a horse badly. He allowed the doctor to make use of, not only one horse but two horses. He did this so that he could take advantage of the doctor’s situation and have Rosa all to himself. The doctor had no choice but to leave his servant girl in the hands of this malicious groom. In fact, the doctor was totally helpless to rescue Rosa.

The habit of placing blame on other people is another theme which was obvious in this story. The doctor places blame on other people by using confusion tactics in arguments, subtly or overtly changing the subject (Bancroft 67). The doctor knew that he had inadequacies, but instead of living up to them and confronting them squarely, he prefers to push the blame on others. He blamed the absence of a horse for his inability to travel to the patient’s house. He blamed his neighbors for failing to give him a horse, an action probably due to his poor relationship with them. On and on like that, he just continued to put blames on others.

WORKS CITED

Bancroft, Lund. Why Does He Do That?. Berkley Books. 2003.

Stephens, Laura. “Nightmares.” 30 Mar. 2006. Psychology Today 25 May 2009

Wheeler, Edward. Current Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1997.