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Doctor
, shows a marked and significant shift of emphasis.

    Kafka put together this volume of fourteen stories with the care of a Yeats or a Wallace Stevens planning a book of poems. ‘The Bucket Rider’, for example, which he had thought of including, he dropped at the last moment, presumably because it did not fit in with the rest of the volume. As it now stands the first and last stories call out to each other across the intervening gap, and each story (including ‘Eleven Sons’) adds a new twist to the central theme.
    ‘We have a new advocate, Dr. Bucephalus,’ the first story begins. ‘There is little in his appearance to remind you that he was once Alexander of Macedon’s battle charger. Of course, if you know his story, you are aware of something.’ But even the usher at the law courts, who presumably does not know his story, though he is, it is true, ‘a man with the professional appraisal of the regular small better at a racecourse’, finds himself ‘running an admiring eye over the advocate as he mounted the marble steps with a high action that made them ring beneath his feet’.
    However, this high-stepping urge is now kept well under control, for ‘[n]owadays … there is no Alexander the Great’. Of course, even in his day ‘the gates of India were beyond reach, yet the King’s sword pointed the way to them’. Today, however, no one even points the way – for in which direction would he point? Many, it is true, still carry swords, ‘but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused’. So, ‘perhaps it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done and absorb oneself in law books. In the quiet lamplight, his flanks unhampered by the thighs of a rider, free and far from the clamor of battle, he reads and turns the pages of our ancient tomes.’
    A loss has been incurred, yet the last little paragraph is neither pathetic nor anguished, but merely resigned: ‘Perhapsit is really best to do as Bucephalus has done.’ His flanks are at least unhampered by the thighs of any rider – yet we recall the high action of his legs as he strides up the staircase of the law courts and feel the waste: a rider pressing into those flanks would at least have given him a goal, a sense of direction. Instead, he consoles himself by poring over ancient law books, though whether he does this out of a sense of duty or desire or merely to pass the time, the story does not say.
    Resignation and its cost is also the theme of the last story in the collection, ‘A Report to an Academy’. In what is probably the funniest story this great comic writer ever produced, an ape addresses a distinguished gathering, recounting how he dragged himself by sheer will-power out of his simian condition and up to his present position. The reason he has done this, he explains, is not from any innate desire on the part of apes to achieve the level of men, but rather that, having been captured and stuck in a tiny cage, he understood that his only chance of escape lay in imitating the men he could see walking about unconstrained before him.
    He cannot, he explains, really comply with the wishes of the academy and speak about his life as an ape; that closed behind him when he was captured and was lost to sight for ever when he decided to transform himself. He can only recount the stages of his transformation: ‘I could never have achieved what I have done had I been stubbornly set on clinging to my origins, to the remembrances of my youth,’ he explains, unconsciously echoing the tone of countless self-made men, Kafka’s father among them. ‘In revenge, however, my memory of the past has closed the door against me more and more.’ As he grew increasingly at ease in the world of men, ‘the strong wind that blew after me out of my past began to slacken; today it is a gentle puff of air that plays around my heels’. ‘To put it plainly,’ he tells the gentlemen of the academy, ‘your life as