Showing results for "Country Doctor" in Anthologies & Short Stories

"A Country Doctor" is a short story written in 1917 by Franz Kafka. It was first published in the collection of short stories of the same title. In the story, a country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night. The doctor faces absurd, surreal predicaments that pull him along and finally doom him. A Country Doctor is perhaps Kafka's most fantastical or surreal work. It takes its cue from Gothic literature – it has echoes of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne – and analysing and identifying the core 'meaning' of the story has proved tricky

The plot follows a country doctor's hapless struggle to attend a sick young boy on a cold winter's night. A series of surreal events occur in the process, including the appearance of a mysterious groom in a pig shed.

Un médico rural tiene que ir a visitar a un enfermo que está en un pueblo vecino, pero su caballo ha muerto y no tiene medio de transporte. Un palafrenero acude en su ayuda y le presta dos caballos, aunque sus verdaderas intenciones no son altruistas. Atravesando una fuerte tormenta de nieve, el doctor llega hasta el hogar del paciente. Una vez allí, tiene la sensación de haber sido víctima de un engaño y teme ser objeto de nuevas burlas.