A Country Doctor: Short Stories

A doctor is needed, but he has no transport. It is winter, he has no horse to harness to his buggy. His own is dead, and no one else will risk their own animals on a journey of ten miles or more in the snow and ice. He has sent his servant girl out searching, but has very little hope. Suddenly, out of his own abandoned pig-sty a man crawls, followed by two horses. The doctor can leave. But the groom immediately bites Rose, the servant girl on the cheek. He says he will not be going but will stay behind with Rose. The doctor protests but can do nothing as before he knows it the horses are galloping off and he is in the farm where his patient awaits.

If that all seems a bit crazy to you, well, you might have some understanding of how it show more feels to read this story. It is short. There are no explanations for anything. One thing happens. Then something changes and another happens. Is it all a dream? is the doctor hallucinating from exposure standing out in the cold of winter? Is the groom a strange sort of representation of what the doctor wants to do?

The only answer I can give is maybe. There is no way to know. Reading it the first time I was totally lost. It made no sense to me. So I reread it. It still didn’t seem to make much sense, only after watching the lecture on the story did it really start to fall into place.

But even when I didn’t understand it I still liked it. I think I may be turning into a fan of Kafka, even if he is terribly depressing. show less

The early Kafka represented in this work is only a pale foreshadowing of the mind that would produce The Trial, The Castle, and Metamorphosis. Many of these stories are simply jotted down thoughts that are only partially developed.

The Country Doctor is the title of one of the stories published in a collection of the same name. They are also included in some versions of The Metamorphosis.

Report to the Academy

This is an amusingly surreal slant on Jewish integration, reminiscent of Gerald the Gorilla in the 1980s comedy show, Not the Nine O'clock News (watch here), but much sadder.

Red Peter tells of “my past life as an ape”, but reminds his audience that they are not far removed from that state themselves. He was wild, captured, and eventually made a conscious choice, “I would cease to be an ape”, because he realised “the way out was not to run away” but to act like a human. So he did - for purely utilitarian reasons, not because he had a desire to be show more human. Nevertheless, he has now “attained the cultural level of the average European”.

All very impressive. and he claims to have achieved what he wished to achieve. In some ways, he thinks himself superior humans (who all look much the same to him, which is telling).

The (tr)icky aspect is that he keeps a “half-trained” chimpanzee at home:
“I take my pleasure with her the way apes do. During the day I don’t want to see her. For she has in her gaze the madness of a bewildered trained animal. I’m the only one who recognizes that, and I cannot bear it”.

He has exiled himself from his own kind, except for the most basic urges, and it's painfully hypocritical to keep her captive. Red Peter though, explicitly does not want judgement - something few Kafka characters escape.

Read the whole story here (8 pages):
http://www.kafka-online.info/a-report-for-an-academy.html

See my review of the stage adaptation, Kafka's Monkey:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/51574137

The New Advocate

A short, surreal animal story: a war horse gives up war to become a lawyer!

A Country Doctor

A disturbing story, with nightmarish unreality (magical realism, even?), coupled with sinister snow (as in The Castle) and a suffering child.

The doctor has to get to the child, but the snow is heavy and he is without a horse. Yet somehow, horses and groom appear in his disused pigsty and he arrives at the child's house unnaturally fast. Once there, he is tormented by fears that the groom will assault his maid, and confusion about whether the child is healthy or dying (or in his imagination), and the strange behaviour and expectations of the family. Grim, uneasy doom. And snow.

You can read the full story here (5 pages):
http://www.kafka-online.info/a-country-doctor.html

Up in the Gallery

This perhaps better belongs in The Hunger Artist collection (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23324204) of performance-related stories. It's an observation of a young woman, riding a circus horse.

You can read the whole page of it here:
http://www.kafka-online.info/up-in-the-gallery.html

A Leaf from an Old Manuscript

Timely when he wrote it and sadly so today. It's about fear and revulsion of immigrants and difference. Those who dislike them, portray them as violent, dirty, liars, robbers, who can't communicate properly, and "even their horses eat meat". The emperor is effectively trapped in his palace, gazing (like many Kafka characters) out of his window.

Before the Law

A chillingly allegorical, often published on its own, and reviewed here, with a link to the full text:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1117329266

Jackals and Arabs

Back to immigrants, but with a more mythical feel. A traveller is greeted by jackals who treat him as a saviour from, or at least a mediator with, the Arabs, with whom they have an ancient blood feud. (The traveller registers no surprise that the jackals can speak.) It's not clear who is in the right, as as with the traveller In The Penal Colony (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/123462555), it raises the question of what an outsider can or should do to change things.

You can read the full story here (3 pages):
http://www.kafka-online.info/jackals-and-arabs.html

A Visit to the Mine

This has similarities with In The Penal Colony (but is more real, and lacking in gore) and the descriptions of the individual quirks of each of the ten engineers is rather like a more comical version of Eleven Sons (below). For one "responsibility has hollowed his eyes", and "while the gentlemen... have long since shed any trace of arrogance, the attendant seem to have accumulated it all in his own person."

The Next Village

Doom in a single, short paragraph.

A Message from the Emperor

A short insight into futility, and gazing through a window.

You can read the full story here (one page):
http://www.kafka-online.info/an-imperial-message.html

A Problem for the Father of the Family aka Odradek

One of Kafka's most surreal snippets, Odradek is a sort of cotton reel, but he moves and talks. His very existence hints at creationism ("one might be tempted to suppose that this object had once been designed") and issues of mortality: "the idea that he might also outlive me I find almost painful", a fear Kafka might well have had about friends and family. But what is the meaning of life anyway? "Everything that dies has previously had some kind of goal" - with the possible exception of the mysterious Odradek.

Eleven Sons

This is an especially sad (though occasionally humorous) but pertinently perceptive description of a man's 11 sons, and the different ways each has disappointed him. Several have acknowledged good qualities, but they are always balanced or exceeded by faults.

One has a minor eye problem, and also, his father thinks, "a slight irregularity of the spirit that somehow corresponds to it". Another is "good-looking" but "not the kind of good looks that I admire". As for the sixth son, who many praise, the father dislikes this because "it really seems to make praise a little too easy if one bestows it on someone so obviously praiseworthy."

Knowing of the fraught relationship between Kafka and his own father (Kafka was his only surviving son), I assumed that each was a facet of the author. However, the introduction to my copy says they were intended as the basis for eleven separate stories (which does not preclude them being based on himself, and some have very close parallels).

A Fratricide

A murder weapon is "superfluous blood-stained ballast"!

A Dream

Well, a nightmare. Who hasn't contemplated their own mortality, wondered what would be said about them when they are gone, and maybe even imagined their burial?

See my Kafka-related bookshelf for other works by and about Kafka: HERE. show less

Another Kafka story which equally baffled me and even more sinister if you found that Noh-influenced Japanese short anime film. Its a story about a doctor and the snow stormy night when he was called out to meet a patient but weird things started happening to him which is hard to explain what happened exactly.

Personally this is more in line towards the Absurdist element than Melville's Bartleby does since this novel is like a ride with Fringe's Dr Walter Bishop on LSD. Unfortunately this story seemed to revolve around the idea of rape too. In fact, when the doctor's horse died from the chill, a man gave him horses for his trip and seemingly went after the maid while the doctor speed to his patient house. Then later the patient's family show more undress him and push him inside the bed naked and everything seemed to went against all sense of reasoning and so we're left in a paranoid loop by the author and his character and neither of us could even make sense of anything.

Honestly, if there are more clarity in this story, I would have been impressed by it. There are moment when I got suck into the story like Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-tale Heart and Raven, but then Kafka just pull out every strand of conscience and reality and jumble it all out and throw it out of the window.

There's also a recurrent element of self-deprecating and suicide which was again the focus from the style and it wouldn't be as menacing had it be more subtle. Kafka was an interesting character with a really dark passenger inside him. But it became obvious that while most touted him as a great influence in "existentialism", all I see was a man grasping at his sanity and becoming aware of the futility of his reality which was suffocating him. show less

Another Kafka story which equally baffled me and even more sinister if you found that Noh-influenced Japanese short anime film. Its a story about a doctor and the snow stormy night when he was called out to meet a patient but weird things started happening to him which is hard to explain what happened exactly.

Personally this is more in line towards the Absurdist element than Melville's Bartleby does since this novel is like a ride with Fringe's Dr Walter Bishop on LSD. Unfortunately this story seemed to revolve around the idea of rape too. In fact, when the doctor's horse died from the chill, a man gave him horses for his trip and seemingly went after the maid while the doctor speed to his patient house. Then later the patient's family show more undress him and push him inside the bed naked and everything seemed to went against all sense of reasoning and so we're left in a paranoid loop by the author and his character and neither of us could even make sense of anything.

Honestly, if there are more clarity in this story, I would have been impressed by it. There are moment when I got suck into the story like Edgar Allan Poe's Tell-tale Heart and Raven, but then Kafka just pull out every strand of conscience and reality and jumble it all out and throw it out of the window.

There's also a recurrent element of self-deprecating and suicide which was again the focus from the style and it wouldn't be as menacing had it be more subtle. Kafka was an interesting character with a really dark passenger inside him. But it became obvious that while most touted him as a great influence in "existentialism", all I see was a man grasping at his sanity and becoming aware of the futility of his reality which was suffocating him. show less

Loved: Before the Law, Kafka couldn't have presented our law in a better analogy! Th brilliance of it all left me breathless and sad because there was sooooo much truth in his words!

Hated: Jackals and Arabs, that was just one mean story! Why point out a certain nation? If he wanted to write this he could have used the Martians for all anyone cared! But just using a race shows that here Kafka's main aim was not presenting a story or even good story telling technique but to present his mere hatred for a nation...

impecable