SOURCE: Sussman, Henry. “The Text That Was Never a Story: Symmetry and Disaster in ‘A Country Doctor.’” In Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction, edited by Richard T. Gray, pp. 123-34. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995.

In the following essay, Sussman argues that the structure of “The Country Doctor” creates an extended metaphor, but not a complete story.

Although organized, perhaps, by an intense oedipal pain, Kafka's “A Country Doctor” never becomes what might be properly called a story. The results are so inconclusive, the characters so blurred as to deny any pretense to narrative cohesion on the part of this brief work. Twice the peasants who receive the doctor's judgments break out into incantations that, like the music throughout Kafka's writing, exemplified by Josephine's piping, are refrains of fugitive and unfulfilled desire. The doctor may indeed be stripped and placed beside the ailing young...