A Country Doctor analysis; ‘A Country Doctor’ is, along wit | English literature 📚

A Country Doctor
analysis;

‘A Country Doctor’ is, along with ‘The Metamorphosis’ (which we have previously analysed here), 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. Even when set aside Kafka’s other work, ‘A Country Doctor’ remains particularly cryptic and opaque.

The mention of Poe is especially pertinent, since it was Edgar Allan Poe, more than any nineteenth-century writer, who helped to pioneer what we might call the ambiguous supernatural tale: a story in which we cannot be sure whether the events being described really happened, or whether they were merely perceived by some unstable and perhaps insane narrator. So, in Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, we cannot be sure if the narrator actually hears the beating of his victim’s
heart from under the floorboards, or if this is an auditory hallucination, a manifestation of his guilty conscience (perhaps even the sound of his own quickened heart rate as his panic starts to mount).

#anlysis #englishliterature #story