A Country Doctor

"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. Even when set aside Kafka's other work, 'A Country Doctor' remains particularly cryptic and opaque.