A Country Doctor, Franz Kafka

“Worms, as thick and as long as my little finger, themselves rose-red and blood-spotted as well, were wriggling from their fastness in the interior of the wound toward the light, with small white heads and many little legs. Poor boy, you were past helping. I had discovered your great wound; this blossom in your side was destroying you (Kafka).”  

This quote from “A Country Doctor” is significant because it shows how the patient’s condition had worsened and tells us what the Groom is doing to Rose. First off, if someone has worms around a wound it’s easy to tell that there’s not much that can be done aside from picking the worms out individually. But the quote shows us the dreamwork theory, one which is condensation. Freud states that “I should like you to notice, too, that the analysis of dreams has shown us that the unconscious makes use of a particular symbolism, especially for representing sexual complexes (Freud 2223).” This is essentially Condensation since it’s one symbol that can represent multiple things, in this case the worm itself is represented by the Groom and the blossomed wound is Rose. The worm is destroying the patient now which is a representation on how the Groom raping Rose as said how the worms are “wriggling from their fastness”. The Groom just went for it after the Doctor left, this also ties to the ending of the text. The Doctor is leaving on a horse which is going slow where he realizes how he has failed to protect Rose from the Groom.  

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