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1.2 A Brief Introduction to A Country Doctor Among Kafka’s many well-respected outstanding works, A Country Doctor is one of the most cherished stories by Franz Kafka. In his testament to his best friend Max Brod, he expressed his will of burning all his works, but A Country Doctor is chosen to be left out, including The Trial, and Castle. The story follows a country doctor's helpless struggle to attend a sick young boy on a cold winter's night. It begins with the doctor having to urgently attend a seriously ill patient, but his sole horse died the night before, so his servant girl Rosa goes off to ask for another. She returns empty-handed. However, just as the doctor is expressing his distress by kicking at the dilapidated pigsty door, a groom appears and supplies him with a magnificent pair of horses. The groom boorishly kisses the servant girl when she tries to hand him a harness, leaving her cheek with two rows of red tooth marks. The doctor scolds him furiously but quickly realizes that he is in his debt, and then jumps into the gig. The groom declines to travel with him, preferring to stay with the terrified Rosa. The doctor can do nothing to stop the groom, who, with a simple "Gee up!‖ sends the horses on their way. The doctor is almost instantly transported to his ill patient's courtyard. 源]自{751·~论\文}网·www.751com.cn/
After being ushered into the house by a family whose explications he does not comprehend, the doctor is quietly implored by the patient to let him die. Initially, he deems him completely healthy, but, after he notices the boy's sister holding a bloody towel, he discovers a deep wound on the boy’s right side, as big as the palm of his hand, and rose-red. The family is pleased to see him at work. The doctor's thoughts are frequently interrupted by the fate of his servant girl. In accordance with a simple melody from a school choir outside the house, the family and some guests undress him and force him into bed alongside the patient. He assures the skeptical boy that the wound is not death dealing and promptly takes up all his belongings and flees the house. However, the horses are now disobedient and ―crawl though the snowy wastes‖ (Kafka, 1971: 254); and the disgraced doctor finds himself wander astray. He feels betrayed by his patients and his community, and he can never go back home. 1.3 A Brief Outline of this Paper The paper consists of four chapters. The first chapter introduces Franz Kafka’s life, works, and the organization of this paper. The second chapter is the literature review of the studies on the short story. Chapter three introduces Sartre’s connotation of freedom. The fourth chapter is the analysis of this short story from the perspective of Sartre's freedom concept, mainly from two aspects: freedom and others, and freedom and responsibility.
2 Literature Review Since this short story has been published, readers and scholars pay great attention to it. What makes it widely spread over the world lies in that it tolerates researches varying from writing style, narrative techniques to the theme of rescue. Researches conducted by Chinese and foreign scholars mainly adapted psychoanalytic theory, biographical researching methods, and even from Kafka's diaries and letters to find clues, to reveal Jewish religious beliefs and other topics such as responsibility, rescue, guilty and punishment. For example, some experts focus on responsibility and faith (Jiang Zhiqin, 2009: 119-123). Eric Mason and Keith Leopold (1964) hold that A Country Doctor is associated with the theory of psychoanalysis in terms of its form and techniques, and to some degree, the former is a parody of the latter. In Ye Tingfang’s (2001) view, the story has a symbolic meaning and A Country Doctor is the mental product metamorphosed by deep inner world and is a modern myth whose fantasy is based on unique life experiences and feelings and is noncompliant with rational customs or conventional logic concepts of life.