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I am going to comment on Kafka's The Country Doctor as though the narrator of the story were a dreamer inside his dream. All aspects of plot, that is, the events that occur, and of character, the dreamer's and other persons in the story, will be considered as dream occurrences—that is, their significance will be seen in relation to the dreamer. This means that the dreamer's reaction to another person or to an event cannot be explained only in themselves, but the existence of the person or event must be seen as emanating from and revealing aspects of the dreamer.
Freud's method of dream analysis makes use of the dream's manifest content to evoke associations that lead back to the latent content—the forbidden wish both satisfied, in compromise form, and concealed by the manifest content. It is often said that Freud's method is of limited use in literary criticism because we do not have the dreamer available to associate to his dream. Of course that is true, and there is nothing that can be claimed about the life of the dreamer other than what appears in the story itself. But literature provides as a substitute for free association the quality of language and imagery which convey the larger structures and components of the work. It is that language and imagery therefore that I rely upon to reveal the deep emotional and sexual forms that condition the plot and character found in the story.
In treating a work of literature as a dream one must necessarily give greater importance to the manifest content than does Freud, since it is that content that forms the esthetic structure to which we respond, and which makes a work of art. And, obviously, the manifest levels of a work of art are more consciously elaborated, more consciously directed toward