how to explain the dreamOne of Kafka's most famous essays
'I am in great distress: I am going on an urgent journey; A very sick man was waiting for me in a village ten miles away. The vast expanse of snow fell between the patient and me, and I had a carriage, light and with large wheels, perfectly suited for our country roads; I put on my leather coat and stood in the yard with my medical kit in my hand, ready to go, but there was no horse, no horse.'
'The Country Doctor' is above all a dream, the dream of a country doctor, which can only be truly entered into by understanding it with the logic of dreams. The first emotion that comes up is 'anxiety,' which is one of the themes of everyone's dreams. The anxiety of not being able to find something or someone is something I think we all have in our dreams. Then 'I' kicked the door of the pigsty carelessly, and a stableman pulled two horses out of it. The maid laughed and said, 'A man never knows what he has in his house.'
This is one of the logic of dreams: to self-relieve anxiety in an imaginary way. But the anxiety was only momentarily relieved, and then in another way it came upon the coachman with more ferocity in an attempt to possess 'my' maid, and 'I' was powerless to be driven away by him. From this plot setting, we can already glimpse the theme of the novel, that is, the individual's powerlessness in the face of the outside world and the anxiety that is difficult to relieve.
The opening statement also shows two characteristics of dreams: strong emotions and strong imagination.
Watching the Hollywood movie 'Silence of the Lambs' in the past, there is a detail that is very interesting: Hopkins instructs Jodie Foster how to catch the deviant murderer who skins women to make clothes in order to become a woman. He said that 'one's imagination begins with the most familiar place around,' implying that the first woman killed by the criminal must have been an acquaintance he knew. Usually we always think that imagination is the most unpredictable, but in fact, the most arouse our imagination, the most imagination, is precisely the most familiar we see every day, they always appear in our dreams in another face. In this dream, as a country doctor, he expresses his anxiety as two situations: when he has to make a house call, he has no equipment to travel; The maid you like is in danger of being assaulted by evil slaves. The former is a direct representation of the situation of daily life, while the latter is more like the continuous thinking of his subconscious in his daily life in dreams.
The horse emerges from the pigsty, which is against the common sense of day life, but it is also one of the logic of dreams: the occurrence and development of things has a self-appointed, absurd and random transfer and grafting. In order to relieve anxiety, 'I' found myself two horses, and they could be conjured out of any random place. This logic of dreams is very much like the lying and lying of children, adults feel ridiculous when listening to it, but we think that we are seamless. If this kind of dream imagination is called 'sudden' or 'inspiration', then the following two kinds of imagination can be called 'extended' :
'The two tall, strong animals, one after the other, pushed each other as hard as they could, their legs pressed close to their bodies, and the beautiful horses hung as low as camels, so that the door was completely blocked, and they could only get out by turning their bodies hard. But they straightened up at once, their legs long and their bodies hot.'
'cried Rosa, doubtless foreseeing the inevitability of her fate, and ran into the house; I heard her clank the door chain; Heard her lock the door; Besides, I saw her continue to rush through the house in the passage, turning off all the lights so that she could not be found.'
There is no doubt that these two extended imaginings are extremely wonderful, the first shot seems to be attached to the horse shooting, the second is a distant: the tall old house in the dark, the silhouette of Rosa in the window flashing fast, the door lock clunk, the light goes out.
'Country Doctor' first attracted me because it was a dream, and that's why it still is. I don't think there are any symbols, metaphors, or deep logical speculation deliberately arranged by the author. These are all in the dream itself, not deliberately placed by the author under the guise of a country doctor's dream in order to express other important themes. That's what's so wonderful about this story: it's a dream for a country doctor. In fact, this is already very remarkable, for us, even our own dreams are not clear to know the context, how to dream for others? Kafka, on the other hand, understood the relationship between dreams and personal life and mastered the laws of dreaming in his mind so that he could dream for others. So no reading of the novel can be done without the specific character of the country Doctor.
As a rural doctor, his dreams are closely related to his life, and everything in his dreams is also deformed from his daily life. Scenes, characters, events, psychology and emotions are also evolved and strengthened by the relationships between characters and the emotions arising therefrom. The relationship between 'me' and Rosa, the maid, and the stableman, may be very peaceful in real life, and the love for the maid and the dislike for the stableman are just some ignored subconsciousness, and in the dream 'I' weave these subconsciousness into a thrilling scenario in which the stableman drives me away and wants to violence the maid, in this scenario, Love, hate, fear, regret, worry, anxiety are all aroused.
Similarly, as a country doctor, his relationship with his patients and their families is exaggerated in this dream.
Look at this paragraph first:
When I arrived at the patient's house, the patient sat up from his duvet, threw his arms around my neck, and whispered in my ear, 'Doctor, let me die.'
The message is twofold: first, the relationship between doctors and patients often has a special warmth; In the second place, the patient's words must have come from the painful look in the eyes of the country doctor, which he felt in his daily practice, and the grief of dying for pain turned into a practical plea in his dream.
The second paragraph:
'I' was still anxious about Rosa, the maid, while treating the patient, and the patient's family misunderstood that I was unwell; 'I' thought that the patient was not sick at all, and after confirming this idea, I was more full of complaints, feeling that I had been too dutiful to the work, and 'my' efforts were not understood and rewarded accordingly.
I have to pay such a price (to lose my beloved maid) for someone who is not sick.
This kind of complaining psychology I want to be understood by doctors more truly, they must have a lot of such complaints in their daily work.
Paragraph 3:
'I' decided to go, moved by the sister's plea (please note: the performance of the family is different father indifferent, the mother helpless, only the sister with tears bit her lips to take out a bloody towel), examined the patient again, found his wound.
Regarding this wound, 'This flower on your body will destroy you' has always been considered as a metaphor and symbol, and my understanding is still to exclude the preconceived metaphor and symbol at the beginning of the author's creation. That detailed description is only out of the doctor's subconscious fear of the wound, and to connect it with the flowers is a dream-like misplaced association. When dreaming, our thinking and imagination often have 'misalignment' situations. Former colleagues appear in the current company, dead people come to meet and talk with us, these are the dislocation of time and space; And it is also the peculiar skill of dreams to connect disparate things, either purely through the illusion of a vague mind, or through the insight into a peculiar and singular connection between things, the wound and the flower being the latter, a metaphor that is astonisingly full of magical symbols and metaphors.
Paragraph 4: The family members became excited when they saw me at work, and, ignoring the fact that the patient was hopeless, they entrusted me completely with the patient, forcing me with songs, and even locking me in the patient's room and hanging me on the patient's bed.
Doctors often encounter excessive demands from patients and their families. Being a doctor seems to entail a duty to save the sick. The meaning of the lyrics is interesting:
Take off his clothes and he'll be cured. (People think it's easy for doctors to cure diseases.)
If he can't cure the disease, kill him (this shows the pressure I feel from their high expectations).
He's just a doctor, he's just a doctor (their mentality is mixed between treating doctors as omnipotent gods and treating them as just another tool to save patients)
The fifth paragraph: 'I' is lying in the patient's bed, and the horse appears at the window again (the constant presence of the horse means that the anxiety of the 'me' moment cannot go away). The patient blamed me for my incompetence, and I cajoled and comforted him.
This is an interesting passage where the patient's complaint is morphed into 'I have very little trust in you.' You just got dumped somewhere. You didn't come by yourself. Instead of helping, you're narrowing the bed for a dying patient. I'd like to rip your eyes out.' The doctor's deception of the patient is so absurd that 'just cut two axes at the sharp corners.'
Paragraph 6: After the patient had been lulled into silence, I escaped and tried to go home, but could only drift on the moor.
In this section, the horses are not tied together, the fur can not be completely thrown into the carriage, drooping on the snow, the horses are not obedient and aimless running, which is a manifestation of 'I' feel that I am 'incompetent', and the children sing the song:
You patients, rejoice
The doctor went to bed with you!
Obviously, it is a self-consolation of 'I' for my own sense of incompetence and the resulting self-blame. 'I' although I can do nothing for the patient, after all, I went to bed with him. This kind of self-liberation is absurd, but in dreams we can often find such absurd excuses for ourselves.
The last paragraph:
I'll never get home like this; My crowded clinic is finished, and a successor is taking my job, but it is useless, because he cannot replace me; Rosa was the victim of the unsavoury stableman who had run amokay in my house; I don't want to think about it anymore. I am an old man, naked, suffering from the cold and frost of this most unfortunate age, wandering about in a human cart and on a non-human horse. My leather coat was hanging from the back of the carriage, but I could not reach it, and none of the nimble patients would help. Got it! Got it! Once you listen to a deceptive bell in the night, you can never get it back.
In reality, the doctor's situation may be OK, but in the dream, he strengthened the tragic side of the expression, he felt the pressure, worry, loss, boredom, loneliness of life, these deviating from the normal life of the psychological and emotional is either diluted or self-repressed in reality, and this dream released them.
In the novel 'The Country Doctor', Kafka reveals the characteristics of dreams, the relationship between dreams and personal real life, the logic of dreams, and the artistic conception of dreams. This is one of the five stories he himself chose to leave us. I hope we don't misread it again, cherish it.