Ein Landarzt holds a crucial position among Kafka's stories. It is title piece in a collection published in 1919 and dedicated to author's father, whose reaction when volume appeared was predictable: it on table beside my bed.' This enigmatic tale was probably not intended for comprehension of any earthly father. It is a provocation, an act of defiance or lunacy,2 as if to say, is my world, accept it or reject me. The father depicted in story is hopelessly limited and narrow-minded (in narrator's perception [951]) -if it were destined to be read by his type of receptor, message could not possibly get through. But is it an encoded message, and if so, in what is it written, how does one go about deciphering it? Is it narrative of a dream, or as one critic has put it rather unsympathetically, incoherent . . . literal transcription [of a nightmare], basically unintelligible because Kafka failed to master [its] form?4 This begs question: what is form of story and its genre? It does appear to be a dream-narrative. If it is, will its Deutung have to be deferred to another lifetime? For as Freud was first to insist, dreamer's current stream of associations must supply connections which render dream-text intelligible. Since even everyday life and language is reducible in content to more primary and private processes of signification, skeptic must conclude logically that understanding is impossible -or that it means no more than charade of emission and counteremission of signs in a semiotic ritual, laws of which are unknown and inaccessible to our conscious selves. But this is another question, why the neurotic's individual myth appears to be written in at once most private and most universal of codes.' That is, isn't dream, after all, ultimately interpretable? The dreamer's code changes