Emerging Themes In A Country Doctor English Literature Essay

Emerging Themes In A Country Doctor English Literature EssayA Country Doctor is a short story written by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a Polish Jew ren featureed for his distinctive literature. It is the story of a artless de sexualize who is called upon to att determination to a long-suffering in circumstances of entire difficulty-deep in the night, amid a severe snowstorm, to travel ten miles when he has of late lost to the cold the life of his horse that draws his carriage. His housemaids efforts to search around for a borrowed horse are fruitless-as the concern himself anticipates. Acting in frustration he kicks open an old disused pigsty, and from it proceeds help a apparel and two horses to his aid-or so he believes- alone for the groom to set him up for the travel and then unexpectedly remain to embark on fulfilling his violent craving on the have-to doe withs defenceless maid, as he has wickedly proclaimed intent.The doctor arrives in no time and is briskly shown to the enduring, who immediately makes his desire to conk undergroundly known to the doctor, cau verbalise this journey to reveal itself to the doctor as an exercise in futility, particularly as he recollects the desperate daub he has left his maid in on account of his own imprudent departure, and as he initially fails to see what is ailing the incapacitate youth. He rejects the old hosts courtesy of a drink of rum offered, affect attention to the patients case in spite of his foregone conclusion.It soon becomes authorize that he plans to leave the young man unattended, but amid all the malaise this realisation causes on the hosts, he is helped by a maidens holding of a bloody cloth to see the patients wound near his hip-a festering disfigured rose-like wound with large worms wriggling inside. The hosts soon strip off his fit out and cast him beside the patient on the wounded side as children sing strangely outside, and the two are left alone together. The doctor is constrained to calm the patient to tranquil death with somewhat self-excusing arguments. He is express emotion to escape this situation and hurriedly climbs a horse naked, dragging the opposite one, the carriage and fur coat on, but the horses make no haste, sorely suspending him in the moment of feeling empty and wasted.Challenged first with the fatality to be capable of responding urgently to a patients call in spite of inconvenient timing, distance and weather secondly with the requirement to procure means in a situation of unanticipated omit which highlights his precarious unsociability (or that of his neighbours) thirdly, the requirement to protect his vulnerable maid from an explicit threat of a sex predator at a time when duty calls elsewhere and fourthly, the requirement to make a correct skipper decision, faced with a patient who wants to be helped to die and amid feelings and thoughts of guilt, the doctor is dis mayed to find himself failing in any case often.Even after he f inds these challenges daunting, he is left to wallow in frustrations he encounters one being his ultimate inability to rescue his maid he is incapable of being urgently helpful to her despite meat to be all along since he left for duty. Things do non work out for him as he had hoped, though initially it is a frustration to him as well that she is abandoned to this vile groom who prefers to interest himself in her misery over accompanying the doctor as the doctor had expected.Yet another is that he finds himself unable to treat his patient-he does not end up curing him. Furthermore, the patient does not even wish to be cured he wishes to die, and is hostile to the doctors attendance. The doctor finds the whole journey amounting to a response to a false alarm, with added schoolmaster frustrations, which rubbed it in how truly sorrowful and humiliated it makes his life.Initially, the death of his faithful old horse was a frustration that he hoped to overcome, but it persists as he finds that the horses he is newly experiencing only serve to complicate his predicament, as if by some conspiracy of circumstances, in the manner which they ride him off when he wishes to stay and help his panic-struck maid and they walk him ever so slowly back whereas he wishes to escape his unpleasant ordeal and return to redeem his already his already molested Rosa. by chance we can call this short story a nightmare. Perhaps it is a literal nightmare-that is plausible-owing to the psychological intensity of the narrated experience. The author almost seems to heraldic bearing and club together the doctors experiences, giving him such(prenominal) little control, and all along portraying how intense the doctors emotions and thoughts are over the whole ordeal. Or it may be viewed as a metaphorical nightmare a storey of events that anyone would hate to experience in real life as they fictionally occurred to the rural area doctor, the main character of the story. Arguably, though, some events in the story occur in a manner somehow fraught with mystery, such as the plot-convenient and plot-rescuing armorial bearing of the pigsty, from which come this groom and these horses which serve to deepen the doctors personal crisis the mischievous and untypical but highly aware songs which the children sing and the intelligent behaviour of the horses. only when thither are themes which emerge in this story.One is the dilemma of professional occupation and domestic or private obligation. This theme is demonstrated especially in that moment when the doctor helplessly witnesses his maid being ambushed by the groom, as he is ridden off in his carriage to work. The predicament haunts him passim his call of duty, and is regularly brought to stark remembrance as he works, make in him an inner restlessness and emptiness. Some commentators have shown this theme as being pertinent in Kafkas life-he is torn between happiness in relationships and his writing career.Another is the moral complexities professional ethics face, as in the case of euthanasia in the medical profession. Is it right to cure a patient who wishes to die? Should a doctor have to make such a decision? Might a doctor sometimes lack the will or form to be helpful to a patient owing to a personal or private crisis? What happens then? Should he be forced to work-is such compulsion successful anyway?Moreover, there is an apparent thematic conspiracy of circumstances, and its potential to change a persons emplacement to life. Is it an ordinary thing-and is it good?Especially because we see another theme the doctor is plunged into an existential crisis. All what he values in his life -both private and professional-is under attack, and he fails to satisfy his own standards and expectations of himself. Is private life deserving sacrificing for profession-particularly if profession is potentially life-saving? Could it be that sacrificing private life ends up destroying ones professional comp etence? Clearly though, the choices sometimes may have to be inversely exclusive, and the individual risks suffering helpless regret whichever way.Kafka, Franz. A Country Doctor. Trans. Ian Johnston. Nanaimo, BC Malaspina University-College, 21 Feb. 2009. Web. 18 May 2010.Soman, Ebey. Literary analysis The Country Doctor, by Franz Kafka. Helium, Inc. Web. 21 May 2010.Bernardo, Karen. Franz Kafkas The Country Doctor. www.storybites.com. Web. 21 May 2010.