Summary
The narrator, a doctor, explains that he is facing a difficult problem: he must tend to a patient ten miles away, but a snowstorm has rendered travel difficult and his horse died the night before. His servant girl named Rosa is searching for someone in town who will lend him their horse, but he thinks her efforts are fruitless.
Frustrated, the doctor kicks the side of the pigsty. Suddenly, a groom appears, wriggles out of the pigsty, and offers the doctor two horses. The horses materialize as if out of nowhere, and the doctor instructs Rosa to help the groom hitch them up. The groom, however, grabs Rosa and kisses her roughly. The doctor threatens to whip the groom, but realizes he is his only hope of getting to the sick patient.
The horses are immediately ready for travel, and the doctor climbs into the carriage.
The groom tells the doctor he is staying behind with Rosa, who runs into the house and locks the door behind her. Before the doctor can protest, the horses are already running, and he can hear the groom breaking down the door to the house in the background.
The doctor immediately arrives at his destination and is swept up by the eager family members of the patient.
In a daze from the speed of the trip, the doctor half-heartedly examines the patient. He concludes that the patient is perfectly healthy, but the young man leans in and whispers to the doctor that he wants to die.
The doctor finally remembers Rosa, and worries how he will be able to save her from the groom when he is so far away. He resolves to head back to his home immediately, but the patient's sister removes his coat and prepares him a glass of rum. The doctor does not drink, and the horses have begun pushing their heads through the window.
Analysis
The beginning of "A Country Doctor" does not immediately alert the reader to the story's notable surrealism. Indeed, the first pages begin as many other short stories do, with a first-person narrative introducing a conflict that must be resolved. In this case, the doctor must reach his patient in a timely manner during a snowstorm but has no means of travel. However, despite its seemingly straightforward and logical narrative, the beginning of the story includes some small details that indicate the doctor's experience is not entirely realistic, or that the doctor himself is not entirely reliable as a narrator.
One of these alarms comes in the form of the groom and the horses. Both of these figures appear seemingly out of thin air, though the doctor notes that they emerge from the pigsty after he kicks the side. Still, Rosa's comment to the doctor that "one doesn't know the sorts of things one has stored in one's own house" suggests that something about these figures is mysterious, strange, and even sinister (1). Indeed, readers might note that the groom crawls out from the pigsty on all fours, casting him as an animalistic and debased creature rather than a helpful servant.
Some critics even interpret the groom's entrance – and subsequent assault of Rosa – as evidence for the story's representation of sublimation. That is, the groom comes to represent the doctor's own erotic desire for Rosa, which he has repressed and diverted into his work. When the groom arrives, then, the doctor's desire come to the surface, and he feels compelled to shield Rosa from the feelings for her that he himself possesses. Whether or not this reading of the groom is accurate is up for debate, but this interpretation does point readers toward the story's unique use of time, characters, and language that render it fodder for the application of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic theory, pioneered by Sigmund Freud in the beginning of the twentieth century (about the time Kafka himself was writing), attempts to understand the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. It was Freud's contention that every human being possesses a subconscious where feelings, desires, and thoughts are both absorbed and repressed. As such, psychoanalytic theory is often associated with the interpretation of dreams, as Freud posited that one's dreams are a manifestation of one's subconscious.
The opening pages of "A Country Doctor" dramatize this dreamlike state, where the setting is both familiar and realistic – a rural area where a doctor lives with his servant girl – and foreign (epitomized by the odd arrival of the groom, the unrealistic speed of the horses, and the doctor's general daze as he examines the seemingly healthy patient). Thus, the opening of the story establishes the narrative's investment in representing the subconscious by challenging readers to notice the small details that run counter to realism.
