"a country doctor," one of the few stories published during kafka's short life, is perhaps the most acute, stunning, and accurate representation of existence to reach us from the age of modernist literature. the piece's history—the way it eludes but pervades kafka's body of work—is appropriate for the subject matter, which relies entirely on the obscurity of meaning through metaphor and transmutation.
the story is primarily astounding in regards to the wound which the country doctor is meant to address, as well as the amount of attention kafka gives to its description—not only in terms of explicit imagery, but also as a larger phenomenon. the story hinges entirely on this wound, after all, from beginning to end. throughout the piece, it sets all events in motion, ricochets between the center and the furthest edges of our radar, and yet shines the brightest when it's absent: the wound is never more itself than when it becomes mere spectacle. the doctor, for his part, is in thrall to the spectacle as much as he is the wound itself. "i have not thrust my services on [the family]," he confides in us; "if they misuse me for sacred ends, i let that happen to me too." the real point of the story becomes the unfolding of the story itself, fragmented and refracted as it is through the narrator's sense of 'being there'.
that the wound is a metaphor for consciousness, that indestructible, eternal element of human existence—the thing that gives being human its particular flavor—is more or less evident. it's a very "fine wound," as the patient says, his "sole endowment" in the world. it's all that he's brought here with him, and we learn along with the doctor just what a shame it is that he's had to share it. before unveiling this masterpiece of a fist-sized sore, the boy simply pleads: "doctor, let me die."
the wound is ceremonious to the extent that it's forgotten in the attention that it drums up, the formality that ensues, the experience of which it's the cornerstone but which nonetheless overshadows it. yet the wound still provides context, reminds us why we're here now and now here, seems to indicate that there's something at the bottom of this. it's a beautiful wound, one which makes the object of the story long for his own death, and one which the doctor may be unable to treat, but can simultaneously acknowledge is "not so bad". it's undefinable, and it presents a real problem for the country doctor; all of his sacrifice, his countless losses, his shame—in the face of this god-forsaken wound, they simply seem to disappear into the cold, wintry night.
but a rose-colored wound the size of a fist is also the size of a heart, the latter of which often comes only at the highest price. the depictions of the wound are jarring, striking, and stimulating in themselves, which is why it's easy to overlook the subtler details built into the text. but the wound's obscurities, rather than the wound's existence, are in fact what endow the text with its meaning. kafka famously said that there's "something indestructible in [a man]," even if that something indestructible, as well as his trust in it, is obscured from him. reasoned out, there are three elements at play in this theory: the industructible something, the resistance it faces in the world, and the subsistence of that self-trust in spite of hardship.
the goal, of course, should be to bring this indestructible something into the light, and to develop our trust in it to a more heightened awareness. this way, we can ensure its subsistence, and that it happens on our terms; we may not be the masters of our destiny, but we can try to be the masters of how we experience it. this likens kafka to friedrich nietzsche, of whom he was an avid reader, and søren kierkegaard—two other modernist thinkers who described the human spirit as a negative, derivative identity. as nietzsche puts it in book i of the gay science, "if the conserving association of the instincts were not so very much more powerful [than consciousness]...humanity would have to perish of its misjudgments and its fantasies...in short, of its consciousness." (11) nietzsche proposes that consciousness has yet to be perfected and so battles with the instinctual drives of being-in-the-world, yielding a third identity: the very humanity which ceases to perish.
likewise, kierkegaard posits that the human spirit isn't a positive element at the ready to be grasped, but instead lurks in the shadows; it appears only as a product of infinitude and finitude, comes to light only through acknowledging the tense relationship these components of ourselves have with one another. "in the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity," he writes in the sickness unto death, "and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation." in other words, the human spirit isn't a given; it must be excavated, interrogated, dug up with intention.
kafka finds himself in good company among these thinkers, whose literary styles, like kafka's, don't lay out a model for existence, but instead tend to do the modeling themselves. in "a country doctor," the rose-colored wound is the indestructible element that persists, but it in itself isn't what actually creates meaning. the meaning, after all, is derived from battling forces: it's important to bear in mind that, just as the wound appears in the doctor's world, rose-red and vivid, his assistant disappears from it, herself named rose, and described—like the wound—with real attention to detail.
a transmutation has occurred. in fact, rose is much more akin to the wound than we might first observe: the mysterious groom and harbinger of rose's downfall is the first to speak her name, and the doctor only begins to use it in reference to her afterwards. "rose" was there all along, but somehow escaped our grasp, eluded us, until it was the object of our attention. yet by then was too late—rose was torn from the storyline. similarly, the rose-colored wound only appears once the doctor concludes that the boy is in adequate health. "i confirmed what i already knew," says the doctor, "the boy was quite sound...and best turned out of bed with one shove." but before the doctor can make his escape, the patient is discovered to be tremendously ill, and the entire occasion takes a perverse turn.
in both instances—the disappearance of rose, and the appearance of the wound—kafka requires the audience to ask how this has happened, and what it means for the development of the narrative. "if there were no eternal consciousness in a man," asks kierkegaard's pseudonymous author johannes de silentio, "if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?" the idea for kierkegaard's unreliable author is that the eternal relinquishes us of forging meaning for ourselves; yet, as we see in "a country doctor," in the very presence of that eternality, we find only mourning, grief, suffering, shame and guilt, regret, remorse.
where the meaning of "a country doctor" really lies, then, is in the connections established between the rose-colored wound—consciousness—and rose, who has been lost forever—the difficulties of being in the world. the point is not so much the wound or rose, but is in the contradictions, the discrepancies, the absurd itself. the patient's wound is allowed to fester, crawling with maggots, despite the doctor's promise that it's not so bad—but the doctor is unreliable, is more concerned with his own festering wound. soon enough, he finds himself in bed alongside his patient, as naked as the day he was born.
"a country doctor" is simply a devastating depiction of what it means to be alive. the piece is short, around 2,500 words, which is why, by the end of it, there's a sense that something's been left undone; the reader might justifiably ask themselves what it is that they're forgetting here, what they're leaving behind. as the country doctor's clothes drag in the snow behind his carriage, it's likely that he's asking himself the same thing.