Robert Müller – Tropen:

-he prefers adventures, because he protests against the narrowness of the bourgeois; he is forever
travelling,

-Mueller’s novel TROPICS: The Myth of the Journey, published in 1915, was seen by German
critics as his magnum opus.( a work of art, music, or literature that is regarded as the most
important or best work that an artist, composer, or writer has produced.) It claimes to be an
account of an expedition by three White adventurers into the Amazon jungle in search of lost
Conquistador gold. The surface action (which takes up around one-third of the text) is
accompanied by pools and bogs and sun-drenched clearings of interior speculation, hallucination
and reflection on consciousness, on dreams and reality, on civilisation and its discontents, on
barbarism, on life vs. technology, on love and eroticism, and much more.

The narrative is framed as a “report” by the only survivor (but not for long) of the expedition: Mr
Average German Engineer Hans Brandlberger. Hans tells us at the same time too much and too
little to be a dependable narrator. The published “report” is accompanied by a Foreword by
someone called “Robert Müller” (who is clearly not the author Robert Müller). So along with
linguistic virtuosity we have layers of fictivity, which allow the text to explore controversial
topics while distancing the (real) author from necessarily identifying with them.

Tropics – The Myth of Travel" is regarded both as prominent text in German exoticism, and as
an exemplary narrative of literary modernity. This book draws the trajectory of exoticism from
the appearance of the term at the end of the eighteenth century to Nietzsche.

Comparative studies in cartography reveal Müller’s deployment of the Amazon River’s fluvium
system as a metaphor of the human nervous system.

The novel’s commitment to hybridisation is a provocative response to the obsessions of

anthropological discourse at the turn of the century. Contemporary research on the work of
Müller is vexed by the question as to whether Müller is a racist or a multiculturalist avant la
letter.

Wthout embellishing Müller’s imperialist disposition, this study demonstrates how the author
gets entangled in paradoxes and contradictions in relation to his own prior thinking. The
literature and political essays of this cultural revolutionary, pacifist and supporter of the idea of a
league of nations, have the capacity not only to facilitate a preview of a new imperial world order
but also to offer a glance beyond it.

Three whites travel up a tropical river; according to the first-person narrator, we are in Brazil.
The declared or unexplained goal of the three is to find gold. They spend some time in an Indian
village, where they experience erotic adventures with Indian ladies to a greater or lesser extent.
But more important than the adventure itself is the relationship between the three white men to
each other, which is quite tense through these adventures. Finally, the three leave the village
(accompanied by - among others - one of the Indian ladies). The fever that had plagued the first-
person narrator at the beginning now grips all three. You lie on the river bank for a long time.
The tension among the whites increases. In the end, one is dead. Accident? Murder? Suicide?
The first-person narrator in his delirium of fever cannot decide or distinguish between them.

The novel thus foregrounds the search for an alternative paradigm, not just to imperialism but to
modernity in general. The premise of this search is manifest in the title of the novel itself, under
the disguise provided by the scenario of this tropical adventure:

I would have called it “The Tropics/Tropes” […] because everything that is, is always and solely
a poetic method, a tropos, and because this strange flora calls to me, bursts forth as a vegetation
of pure matter, storeys-high, in elephantiasis, it grows under my feet and changes my point of
view, and because its sap is, however, always my own circulating blood and never alien. (Müller,
1993: 303)

In the light of Nietzsche, whose influence in Tropics/Tropes is explicit, the above lines would
mean that reality is an aesthetic invention brought about by the creating Subject and is nothing
but a fiction. Furthermore, reality is synonymous with the “I” which is mirrored onto everything,
in the form of metaphor or trope, for the Other does not exist and the voyage is nothing but a
myth (the novel’s subtitle states this expressly). For this reason, the narrator can also proclaim
the thesis “The Tropics/Tropes is I” (Müller, 1993: 402), i.e. the aesthetic narrative of the world
represents simultaneously the construction of the Subject, which is also made by aesthetic
means, metaphors and symbols.

38Taken thus, the theme of the novel is, in fact, the construction of a New Man or of a New Self
in the realm of the aesthetic. The voyage to the tropics (the primordial act of imperialism) is
designed to displace the crisis of the modernist subject to the frontier which separates the Self
from the non-Self, or, in Adorno’s terminology, the non-identical from the identical. 

Tropics/Tropes unfolds at the crossroads of both logics. The novel is an essay on the Self, which,
like the text, unfolds in a network of paradoxical and symbolic relations. This labyrinthine
network guarantees both the identity of the Self with regard to itself (i.e. non-identification with
the whole) and identity with every new element, progressively absorbed by the potentially
universal structure of the Subject. According to Müller, the new Self should constitute a
synthesis of every human capacity and of every epistemological principle which distinguish the
different cultures. The narrative staging of the encounter with the Other in Tropics/Tropes should
be understood in this context. Since the voyage is denounced as a myth, the Other cannot be
other than a mask with which the Self in search of itself covers its face. Thus, the Subject tries
on, in successive mirrors, its infinite identities, interconnecting them with one another. This is
why the Indians, especially the women, notably Zana as a symbol of the feminine and of sexual
drives, personify characteristics that have to be psychologically and epistemologically absorbed
by the synthetic construction which is the totalising New Man. The characters who, in turn,
represent diverse features of western Man, should equally be understood as experiments
(“essays”) in the process of distilling the New Self

-the narrative is a poetic voyage that works through the projective elements of tropicalization.
Tropical nature has erotic conotations, its fluidity is highlighted and in “Tropen” it becomes
purely metaphoric depiction of the condition of European Humanity

-“Tropen”=literary representation of a philosophical insight into the relativity and subjectivity of

reality and its effect on the individual. Nature has a purely metaphoric function

-it presents the asthetic of panorama that frames nature as a theatrical display on state, not as an
interactive environment
-the main features of Tropen: namely its exoticism, primitivism, and its colonial
and racial dimensions. Put differently, Nietzsche stands behind Müller,
providing the link between the philosophical and literary dimensions of
Tropen.

What makes matters still more nebulous is that

the reader can never be too sure if the narrated events are imagined or real.
For long stretches, the novel refuses to provide a reality index to the narrative
events. Occurrences that in a first account appear to be dream sequences
may, according to a subsequent account, have actually happened. Important
events, such as the death of an indigenous woman (was it murder or an accident?),
are left ambiguous

The indigenous people are represented

as savage, childlike, instinctual, and sometimes cruel beings; they are
closer to nature, animal-like, and they do not shy away from modes of conduct
and forms of physical violence and sensual excess that are unacceptable
in civilized Europe. This makes for their attraction as well as repulsiveness in
the eyes of the travelers. In sum, Müller at first portrays the members of the
indigenous tribe in terms of the clichés typical for the depiction of primitive
cultures as seen by the West

In spite of the boredom he experiences in the «timeless» jungle, the narrator

espouses the tropics as an alternative to his Western life style. He is convinced
that his future lies with the inhabitants of the tropics, who live in a state of
happiness. His first erotic encounter in the jungle proves to him what he had
always known, namely that «das fremdrassige dunkle Mädchen» would dispel
the memory of the «abgeschmackte[], bürgerliche[] Turnier mit Scharen
zu Seelen verkrüppelter Weiber» (51) that he had been engaged in in Europe.
From this moment on he swears to forsake the culture of the German bourgeois,
and to honor the «überlegene[] Bildung dieser Wilden» (52) and the
spirit that emanates from their carefree life. «Der Kampf der Rassen und
Sinne ist in meinem Herzen entschieden» (51). In other words, his exoticism
has gotten the better of him: he has gone native.

However, this state of affairs does not last long, and, in the end, the novel
provides an entirely different picture of exoticism and of exotic literature than
was the rule in turn-of-the-century Europe. In a nutshell, it suggests that the
tropics, into which Europeans project their fantasies, do not exist.

The tropics are – as announced by the title – but a trope for the longing in
«modern man,» i.e., the European, the Northerner (Nordmenschen), for an
experience that is more instinctual than life in Western Europe. Therefore, the
true nature of the exotic consists not in geographical location, in the distance
gained to decadent Europe, but rather in a psychological condition.
It is in this sense that, as the narrator claims, the tropics do not exist («Tropen
gibt es nicht» [85]). The myth of travel, as false expectation, consists,
therefore in the assumption that the traveler will satisfy some sense of longing
in far-away tropic regions. The reality, the narrator suggests, is that he finds
the longing within himself, and no amount of travel to the far ends of the earth
will quench it.

Afrikanische Spiele

-in this narrative, Jünger processed a central personal experience from his youth in the period
before the First World War in a relatively free literary manner, whereby the central key data and
content points of "African Games" are identical to the key data and events of Ernst Jüngers' real
foreign legion adventure.

The relatively short narrative tells in a humorous and at the same time somewhat wistful tone
how the eighteen-year-old Ernst Jünger (his "alter ego" here is "Berger") decided in 1913 to
leave school and his parents' house behind and to begin a career with the French Foreign Legion.
Jünger was - as he himself or his alter ego Berger admits at the beginning of the story - was a
miserable student and escaped from this adverse reality during his school years - by "eating in"
tons of adventure literature and indulging in more or less heroic reverie in class. At the end of the
intellectual flight movement, the story tells the real escape of the minor from his parents' home in
Hanover and the trip to Verdun, where he is successfully recruited by the Foreign Legion. Berger
is transferred to a garrison in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, a city in northwestern Algeria and a center of the
Foreign Legion. The group that Berger meets in this garrison is a colorful bunch of stranded
outsiders and losers, some with criminal backgrounds from all over the world, who are held
together by their superiors with strict discipline. The service in this desolate barracks is
depressing and boring, so Berger quickly tries to escape with his comrade Benoit in order to flee
across the border to Morocco and find freedom there. But Berger and Benoit are not up to the
strain of a long walk; the company is also poorly prepared. The next morning after the escape,
the escapees are discovered and returned to the barracks by gendarmes, where the garrison
commander punishes them with fifteen (Benoit) and ten (Berger) days in arrest. After a few
weeks, Berger's father succeeded in buying the underage son back from the Foreign Legion and
transferring it back to Germany through diplomatic contacts and considerable financial resources
- Bergers or Jüngers father was wealthy. The novel ends with Berger's return to Germany.The
author's conclusion on the second to last page of the novel after this ridiculously failed and
disappointing attempt to break out of the Wilhelmine school reality and the fatherly family order.

-"African Games" is an interesting and insightful narrative by Ernst Jüngers in that he points to
the genesis of his lifelong search for the liberating adventure and also explains why he has lived
uncivil, solipsistic, anarchistic and heroic ideals throughout his life.

-For him(for the character), Africa is "the epitome of wild, unprecedented and impassable nature
and thus an area in which the encounter with the extraordinary and the unexpected is most
likely". The blissful country, where you are independent of earning money, you live from hand
to mouth, collect or loot. Here the "flowers are bigger, their colors deeper, their smells burning".

-He hopes to find a fairytale-like country far away from the books, "maybe a place where the
laws are waived (...) also the island of oblivion", but he fails across the board. He finds the banal.
Instead of entering uncharted territory, he enters a dreary world of boredom on dirty cots, which
is all about ducking away from senseless commands
"African Games" is also a book about intoxication, in dawning as well as in sensual experience.
Absinthe: "All things turned into many types of soft, colorful cotton." Opium: "You see the small
infinitely enlarged and the large infinitely small."

 Vor dem Gesetz – kafka ( in the eyes of the law)

An unknown country man, probably an alter ego Kafkas, tries to find entry into the "law",
symbolized by a courtroom, in this parable, but his project already fails at the doorkeeper, who
says it with the words "It is possible now but not "rejects. Days and years pass, the man repeats
his wish again and again, but the goalkeeper remains undeterred despite all attempts to bribe
him.

Finally, one day, after decades of unsuccessful attempts to enter, the man from the countryside
shortly before his death asked why no one else had asked for admission. The goalkeeper replies:
“No one else could get in here because this entrance was only for you. I go now and close it”

Typical for Kafka, the text is written in a very neutral, authorial narrative form. Descriptions of
the two only acting characters, the country man and the goalkeeper, are limited to their external
actions, as well as their statements. The mental life of the man from the country can be guessed
from his actions (the fact that he never tried to overcome the goalkeeper, e.g. indicates cowardice
or respect), but is not explicitly described anywhere. The goalkeeper's inner life remains more
closed to the reader, the text creates the effect that it is less a concrete person, more of a symbol
of power.

To interpret the text, it is advisable to use the three interpretative approaches typical of Kafka:
the autobiographical, religious and the social / political approach.

From an autobiographical perspective, “Before the Law” is a processing of his Oedipus complex
that is typical for Kafka. The sublime, powerful and, in a way, "knowing about the law"
goalkeeper (symbol for Kafka's authoritarian father) turns out to be a blatant opponent to the man
from the country (Kafka himself), who at first is just as shy and respectful as despaired later in
the story and is shown sick.

Kafka tried to break out of his routine and lonely life for the rest of his life, he wanted to quit his
boring job as an insurance lawyer, wanted to get married, start a family, but Kafka's father, to
whom his son's career was particularly important, always proved to be decisive Obstacle. Just
like the man from the country to the law, Kafka wanted to have access to the "deeper meaning",
probably to the meaning of life, but just like that, the authority person held him up for years
without reason or reason, without any causal connection, until this (a really gloomy prophecy )
lonely and bitter, in Kafka's words even "become childish", dies.

The religious interpretation of the text turns out to be somewhat less clear in the distribution of
roles: The subject (the man from the country), who stands symbolically for "the seeker man" (or
Kafka himself), tries to find an entry into the law, which probably is a "divine revelation" or a
"deeper knowledge". The goalkeeper, perhaps a rabbi (Kafka was a Jew) or symbolic for the
entire organized religion, refused entry to the subject, arguing that the time for deeper knowledge
was not yet ripe. Until the end of his life, man waits for enlightenment on the part of religion, but
this does not happen, mainly due to the delayed tactics of religious authority figures. The
promised Kingdom of Heaven (also a possible interpretation for the "law") ultimately remains
just a dull glow through the gate slot, may even prove to be only an empty promise by the
goalkeeper, who hereby tried to suppress the seeker or make it submissive.

The story can be understood as Kafka's criticism of the authority thinking of the Judaic religion:
the priests, who should actually bring the revelation closer to the people, use their status as
authority figures only for their own purposes and even alienate people from religion. The
"seeker" is not helped, on the contrary: his plight is shamelessly exploited.

The third interpretation approach deals with the social / political statements of the text and
proves to be the best documented due to the content and motivic parallels to Kafka's main work
"The Process".
In this approach, the man from the country simply stands for everyone, for every citizen of the
state who demands insight into the law (taken literally or as a symbol for the "sense"), but is
rejected by the rampant bureaucracy (the goalkeeper). Like Josef K. from the “Trial”, the man
from the country finds himself in the unknown world of justice, in which authorities and
irrational rules determine the fate of the individual, but not the individual himself. This
“kafkaesque” situation becomes underlined by motifs that later characterize the novels "The
Castle" and "The Process": the entire story takes place in rooms, walls, even if they are not
described, narrow the protagonist's field of vision, creating a feeling of helplessness , being
trapped. Doors are the only way to freedom, but they are always locked and only cause more
distress because they offer a little longing glance at the unknown that they have to hide. Also the
goalkeeper's statement “I am powerful. And I'm just the bottom gatekeeper. But there are
doorkeepers from room to room, one more powerful than the other. Even the sight of the third
cannot even be borne anymore. ”Alludes to the motif of the“ process ”: trapped in an eternal
odyssey through the abysses of the judiciary, the subject cannot focus on an achievable goal and
must at some point find resigned, that there was never one.

"Before the law" is a parable pervaded by the typical Kafkaesque motif of "searching and not
finding", which as a conclusion seems to find the "meaning" only in the senselessness. The
meaning of the cryptic text itself is deliberately kept open, none of the interpretations mentioned
alone can encompass the text in its full depth, the text must not be understood as a pure criticism
of religion and society or as a purely autobiographical processing. If you place the parable in
Kafka's oeuvre, you will find almost all motifs and storylines that will later characterize his
novels. The text can thus be described as a work typical of Kafka.

Die Sorge des Hausvaters

Traducere in engl:

The Preoccupations of a Family Man

Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to explain on that basis the origin of
that word. Others again believe it is of German origin, only influenced by Slavonic. The
uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to safely assume that neither is accurate, especially
as neither of them provides the actual meaning of the word.
Of course, no one would deal with such studies if there were not actually a being named
Odradek. At first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool of thread, and indeed it does seem
covered with thread; to be sure, only ragged, old, knotted and entangled pieces of the most varied
sorts and colors.  But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks out of the middle
of the star, and another tiny rod is joined to that at a right angle. With the help of this latter rod
on one side, and of one of the points of the star on the other side, the whole thing can stand
upright on two legs. One is tempted to believe that the creature had once some convenient form
and now it is just a broken remnant. However, this seems not to be the case; at least there is no
sign of it; nowhere can one see additions or fractures  that would indicate anything of the sort.
Although the whole thing seems a nonsense, however, it is concluded in his own way. Nothing
more precise can be said either, because Odradek is extraordinarily nimble and difficult to catch.
He lurks in the attic, in the staircase, in the corridors, in the entry. Sometimes one does not see
him for months; he has presumably moved into other houses; but then he infallibly comes
faithfully back to our house. Sometimes, when you step out the door, he's right there and leans
against the banisters, and you feel inclined to speak to him. Of course, one would not pose
difficult questions, but treats him - given his his size - as a child. “What's your name?” one asks
him. “Odradek” says he. “And where do you live?” “No fixed abode,” he says and laughs; but it's
just a laugh that can be produced by someone with no lungs. It sounds a bit like the rustle of
fallen leaves. So the conversation usually ends like that. However, even such simple answers are
not always obtained; often he remains a long time in silence, as the wood, which he seems to be
made of. In vain wonder I what will happen to him. Can he actually die? Everything that dies,
has some kind of goal, has some sort of activity by which he has worn himself out; this is not
case with Odradek. Perhaps, shall he someday still be rolling dragging his thread down the stairs
at the feet of my children, and my grandchildren? Obviously, he hurts nobody; but the idea that
he should even survive me, gives me almost a pain.

Sensul

Odradek appears to represent an object with no clear purpose or apparent use. It appears not
unlike an exhausted spool for thread, wound about by "old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and
tangled together, of the most varied sorts and colors". However, the text makes it explicit that
there is no apparent use for the object. As such, scholars such as Samuel Rammelmeier have
argued that the obscurity and uselessness of the object serves to create a foil for the narrator.
[7]
 He argues that the object's apparent uselessness, when seen in light of the existential dread
pervading the last paragraph, can be understood as underlining the narrator's lack of purpose.
This is an opinion shared by Heinz Politzer when he states that Kafka's absurdist writing
emphasizes the meaninglessness of its subjects' lives.[8] Such an interpretation can be compared
to the nihilist tone of Kafka's better-known work, The Metamorphosis.

Willi Goetschel analyzes "The Cares of a Family Man" from several perspectives. From the
perspective of Marxist literary criticism the story might be a critique of capitalism in its last
stage. Odradek represents commodities, it is "what is left of life once everything is reduced to
materialism".[9]

Anya Meksin agrees that this interpretation is possible from a Marxist perspective. Odradek,
being made of thread for mending, represents the world of manmade practical objects separated
from the human work that produced them, and the relation between the house father and Odradek
represent the alienated relation between worker and commodities he has produced. The idea that
Odradek will survive the narrator and the anguish this situation causes to him can also be
interpreted as the idea of commodities being inherited and transcend the worker who made them,
but in such a way that the worker himself would be completely ignored.[10]

A religious perspective opens up another interpretation of the text. Goetschel indicates that the
star-shaped form of the creature might represent tradition (specifically Jewish tradition), which is
passed on from generation to generation and accumulates some more bits of "thread" in each
generation.

According to Meksin, Odradek represents a rupture between the world of the family man and
some other transcendent realm. It is immortal, and hides in shadows carrying a message from
generation to generation, and witnessing it all. Meksin goes on to indicate that the physical
description of Odradek with its wooden crossbar sticks joined to that at a right angle can also
remind us of crucifixion.
While Rammelmeier argues against clean-cut metaphorical interpretations of the story, he
acknowledges that Odradek possesses some supernatural qualities, such as disappearance and
reappearance.[13] He states that these supernatural qualities are made all the more prominent by
the text's otherwise objective or sachlich style. He adds that, due to the text's stylistic dryness, a
reader who reads the story through an ideological lens may find evidence for any interpretation
they may wish to hold. Nevertheless, the story's last passage and its concern with "my children's
children", the object's apparent lack of purpose, the ephemeral qualities of Odradek, the religious
symbolism of the transverse rod and the star shape, and the mention of death in the last line of
the story provide textual evidence for associations of Odradek to religion, or at least cultural
traditions.[

Ein Landarzt

In engleza : https://www.kafka-online.info/a-country-doctor-page2.html

An atmosphere of quasi-detached objectivity stands in almost eerie contrast to the story's

dramatic impact and underlying miraculous character. Typical of Kafka, however, the language
reflects the complete union between dream world and reality; in fact, the horses, ghostly
embodiments of irrational forces, seem to drive, besides the doctor, even the author farther on.
Kafka's recurring motif of the hunt (compare this story with "The Hunter Gracchus" and "The
Burrow") has found expression in these galloping sentences, each seeming to chase the one
before it.

The story begins in the past, switches to the present in the rape scene, reverts to the past, and
finally shifts back to the present at the end, thus elevating the final catastrophe to the level of
timelessness. At an even faster pace, images that share no logical connection with each other
rush toward the story's last sentence: "A false alarm on the night bell once answered — it cannot
be made good, not ever." Here is a good starting point for examining the story.
From the story's last sentence, it becomes evident that the whole story is the inevitable
consequence of a single mistake. By following the call — a mere hallucination, a nightmare —
the doctor triggers a long chain of disastrous events. His visit to the patient seems to be a visit
into the bewildering depths of his own personality, for there is no actual ringing of the bell. The
strange (and estranged) patient waiting for him does not really exist outside the doctor's
imagination; he may be seen as part of the doctor's personality, playing a role comparable to that
of the "distant friend" in "The judgment" or the gigantic insect in "The Metamorphosis." "A fine
wound is all I brought into the world," the patient complains, thereby suggesting that the doctor
is his potential healer and belongs to him. During his entire journey, the doctor never leaves the
vast regions of his unconscious, of which his patient is perhaps the darkest aspect.

In portraying this nightmare, Kafka has succeeded in portraying the situation of the man who
wants to help but cannot. Kafka may well have seen himself and the whole profession of writers
in the position of the country doctor: a man fighting against ignorance, selfishness and
superstition, he remains exposed to "the frost of this most unhappy of ages." This is a diagnosis
not only of a specific situation but also of the condition of our whole age. This is why the
patient's question is not if the doctor will heal him or cure him, but if he will save him. "That's
how the people act in my district; they always expect the impossible from the doctor," he says,
explaining why he — or, on another plane, the writer — cannot be of any real help to the patient.
He finds himself confronted with people whose consciousness is still attached to the realm of
magic. They reveal this by stripping the doctor of his clothes and laying him in the bed alongside
the patient. "The utterly simple" tune following this ritual reflects their primitivism, which would
not hesitate to use the doctor as a scapegoat and kill him if his art should not work.

The story is dedicated to his father, who ignored it completely. The misunderstanding between
the physician and the patient is a reflection of the equally barren relationship between the old
Kafka and the young Kafka. Knowing to what extremes Kafka tends to carry the art of name-
giving, it is easy to see that the servant girl's name, Rose, is by no means accidental: "rosered" is
the color of the meticulously described wound, and the color rose, as well as the flower, is an
age-old symbol of love in its manifold facets.
The groom represents Kafka's sometimes almost obsessive fear of a sexually superior rival. On
this subject, he wrote that Felice did not stay alone and that someone else got close to her who
did not have the problems which he, Kafka, had to face. In the story, the groom certainly gets to
Rose easily, and if she says "no," she nevertheless runs into the house fully aware of her fate.

"If they misuse me for sacred reasons, I let that happen too," the doctor says. Yet his sacrifice
would be senseless because it is beyond a physician's power to help an age spiritually out of
kilter. It is out of kilter because, as everywhere in Kafka's work, people have lost their faith and
have taken to living "outside the law," listening to the false prophets of unbridled technological
progress and conformism. The boy does not trust the doctor, and his family displays the
subservient and naive behavior of the average patient. As the doctor puts it: "They have
discarded their old beliefs; the minister sits at home, unraveling his vestments, one by one; but
the doctor is supposed to be omnipotent." This is why the song of "Oh be joyful, all you patients
— the doctor's laid in bed beside you!" is the "new but faulty song": the empirical and the
transcendental realms are no longer one; the only way they meet is in the form of a clash leading
to a "false alarm."

Only if we understand Kafka's notion of disease as resulting from seclusion can we begin to
understand the country doctor. He is the subject and the object of his long quest or, expressed
differently, the psychoanalyst of his own inner landscape (on another level, our whole
secularized age) and the patient. And Kafka, though interested in Freud's teachings, regarded at
least the therapeutical part of psychoanalysis as a hopeless error. According to Kafka, anxiety
and concomitant alienation are the direct consequence of man's spiritual withering, and all
psychoanalysis can possibly do is discover the myriad pieces of one's shattered universe.

Without his doing anything special, the doctor draws exactly the help he needs when he kicks the
door of the pigsty. Like his whole trip, the sudden appearance of horses, groom, and gig bears
the mark of the miraculous and the supernatural. Ever since Plato's (Phaidros) famous parable of
the chariot being pulled by one white horse and one black horse, symbolizing the bright and the
dark aspects of irrationality (rationality is in charge and tries to steer a middle course), horses
have symbolized instincts and drives. The fact that they have come out of a pigsty here
underscores their animalistic nature. Twice the doctor complains that his own horse died, and
both times his remarks are accompanied by winter scenes, suggesting the barrenness of the
(spiritual) wasteland around him.

Right away, the horses respond to the fiery "gee up" of the groom, who has already demonstrated
his kinship with their world by calling them "brother" and "sister." The doctor also yells "gee up"
at the end but, time being the correlative of experience, they will only crawl "slowly, like old
men"; escaping from the patient and erring through the snowy wastes, the doctor has no
experience by which to divide up time and, consequently, loses his orientation. The horses take
over completely, at any rate, covering the distance to the patient's farm in an incredibly short
period of time which, symbolically enough, is exactly the time it takes the groom to subdue
Rose. Greatly adding to the story's dramatic impact, the doctor's night journey and Rose's rape
are merged here on a logically inexplicable level.

"You never know what you're going to find in your house," Rose says, "and we both laughed."
This line may be a clue. It is important that it is she who says this statement; she is better attuned
to the realm of irrational forces than he, who spends most of his trip regretting that he has never
noticed her, much less enjoyed her physically and spiritually. Now he realizes his negligence, but
now it is too late because she has already been sacrificed to the groom. Her comment and their
laughter at the sudden appearance of the horses reveal that these sensual and spiritual elements
are present, but that they need to be brought out. On a literal level, this happens as they come out
of the pigsty.

The closing picture of the fur coat trailing in the snow behind the doctor mirrors the helplessness
of one who has been "betrayed." Traveling through endless wastes on his straying gig, the doctor
is doomed to see the symbol of warmth and security without being able to reach it. Naked and
cold and gone astray, the country doctor is the pitiful picture of disoriented mankind drifting over
the treacherous landscape of its sick collective consciousness. And there is no end in sight
because "he was used to that."

The question of the doctor's guilt provokes thoughts of uncertainty and ambiguity. As
everywhere else in Kafka's work, the hero does not commit a crime or even a grave error. We are
apt to get closer to the situation when we realize that he maneuvers himself, or permits himself to
be maneuvered, into a state of mind which forces him to refrain from concrete decisions and
commitments. In this sense, he becomes guilty of the classic existential sin — failing or refusing
to become involved. By not taking his profession seriously and therefore lacking in
responsibility, he forfeits his only chance of taking the decisive step from mere vegetating to
conscious living. True, as a medical man he cannot be expected to save a patient whose sickness
is, above all, of a spiritual nature. Yet he is guilty because he lacks the will to try his level best;
he is afraid to act like a "world reformer" and pats himself on the shoulder for doing so much
work for so little pay. Nor does he bother to view the wound as the result of the complex but
undeniable interrelationship between physical and psychological factors of which Kafka himself
was very much aware. Symptomatic of our age, the country doctor is the one-dimensional man
who has lost a sense of participation, not only in the sphere of the sensual, but also in that of the
spiritual.

Like the doctor himself, his "pack of patients" has stepped outside the law" and into chaos. From
there, they cannot help, the point being that they have lost the capability of doing that long ago.
Whoever breaks out of Kafka's "human circle" alienates himself to the point of death. Kafka is
most clear in this story: the impossibility of curing our age is his subject.

Alta sursa, alt mod de a vedea povestea:

The Challenges Of The “Country Doctor”

Lack of transport: the first challenge the doctor faces is the lack of transport. The main means of
transport appears to be a horse drawn carriage. However, the doctor’s horse has died and none of
his village mates or friends are willing to lend him a horse to transport him. The doctor must find
transport for himself and his heavy equipment bag, to get him to his patient which is 10 miles
away.

Bad weather: this is the second challenge faced by the doctor on his journey to treat a patient.”a
severe snowstorm filled the space between me and the patient”. Even as the doctor stands in the
courtyard awaiting assistance, his feet are “increasingly covered in snow” making it even more
difficult to move
The new means of transport: although the doctor finally gets help from a stranger, he finds it
difficult to control the new animals. Their behaviour seems to be unlike that of his own horse
which he was used to. In fact the doctor clearly refers to them as “…uncontrollable horses….”
when he ties them up on arrival to his patient’s residence, they somehow find a way to loosen
their straps and hound him as he attends his patient,

Work burden with low pay: the doctor is employed by the district, and is expected to respond to
all calls of emergency, even those that prove to be unnecessary. A night bell hangs at his house,
so that the citizens of the district can demand his attention whenever they feel it’s necessary. The
citizens have often called upon him even when they are not so sick. Despite all the work he is
expected to do, he is “badly paid”. He does his duty to the full, even when it’s “too much” but is
paid meagrely.

Frustrations Of The Doctor

Because of the lack of transport, the doctor must stand in the cold having sent his servant to fetch
any transport available. However, he is solely aware that no transport will be found in that
weather and at that hour, however he must try for it is part of his duty. The doctor is frustrated at
the unkindness of his neighbours and citizens of the district ho call upon him at ungodly hours
yet will not lift a hand to help him when he needs the help. The doctor is so frustrated that he
imagines he may have to straddle pigs, if he is to get to his destination, (Kafka 1995).

The bad weather makes it difficult for the doctor to find any transport. He is left to freeze in the
cols while awaiting a good Samaritan who seems unlikely. This situation the doctor sees as
“hopeless”. The bad weather has not only caused the death of his horse, it has also made it
impossible for the doctor to find any other means of transport. The doctor is frustrated that the
bad weather has made him immobile. As the doctor escapes the village, once again we
experience his frustration with the weather. Although he gets away, his clothes are in the wagon
and he is forced to control the horses while naked. He is very cold yet he cannot reach his clothes
and control the horses at the same time.

The doctor cannot control his new horses; he is frustrated that the animals are slowing him down.
Although he plans to return home for the night, the horses are uncontrollable often not following
his command. As he escapes the village, he commands the horses to “…giddy up” but they drag
themselves slowly through the cold weather prolonging his suffering.

Finally, because of his low salary and work burden the doctor cannot pay for a new horse. He is
frustrated because he feels that the demands of his work may have forced him to sacrifice Rosa,
his beautiful maid servant. Although he would like to be at home, protecting her from the brute
gentleman who has lend him the horses, his duty demands that he attend his patient first and he
has no money to pay for the horses.

Why “Nightmare”

From the beginning of the story nothing seems to go right for the country doctor, the doctor
seems to be plagued by bad luck all the way. First he lacks transport, and then he must sacrifice
his friend for some means of transport. Once he arrives at the patient’s he finds that though he is
injured, the wound is really bad, and the family expects some form of miracle cure. In the end
the same people who called on him for help turn against him, forcing him to run away naked and
alone in the dark. Although he manages to run away, his horses trudge along slowly oblivious to
the cold weather and his suffering. The doctor’s misfortunes seem too much and unrealistic, they
can therefore be termed as “a nightmare”.