The Country Doctor serves as protagonist and narrator. He stands as an elderly medical professional dedicated yet increasingly burdened by his rural duties. His background reflects professional commitment alongside financial hardship, working as an underpaid district employee serving impoverished villagers who demand impossible medical solutions. Summoned during a snowstorm to treat a critically ill boy, he faces transportation problems after his horse died the previous night. Initial helplessness shifts to reluctant acceptance when a mysterious groom emerges from his pigsty, providing supernatural horses. This encounter reveals his passivity and moral compromise; he protests the groom's assault on his servant Rosa but abandons her to fulfill his medical duty. Throughout the journey, persistent guilt over Rosa's fate implies latent concern or unresolved attachment. Upon reaching the patient, he first misjudges the boy's condition as trivial, displaying professional fallibility. Reexamination uncovers a grotesque, worm-infested wound on the boy's hip, exposing his inadequacy and the villagers' unrealistic expectations. His internal monologue acknowledges medical futility despite external reassurances to the family. During this crisis, his thoughts repeatedly return to Rosa, intertwining professional failure with personal remorse. Forced by the family into the patient's bed, he undergoes symbolic degradation through enforced nakedness. After escaping through a window, he embarks on an interminable return journey. The supernatural horses now move agonizingly slowly through a snowy void, reflecting irreversible existential condemnation. He laments the loss of his practice, home, and Rosa, concluding that answering the false emergency call doomed him to perpetual exile. No concrete background details exist regarding his origins, family, or life beyond this narrative sequence. His development follows a trajectory from dutiful practitioner to powerless victim of absurd circumstances, culminating in eternal wandering as a disgraced figure stripped of profession, dignity, and purpose.