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“The carriage is torn away, like a piece of wood in a current.”

At the beginning of the story, the doctor’s journey is symbolic of a brief human life cycle. It’s already the winter of his life as he approaches his own inevitable death, and he is helpless to fight against it. The journey to the sickbed of his patient is miraculously quick, representative of the briefness of life. No one can resist or fight against his own mortality. The doctor is swept away in the current of his own life without any power, with the ability to escape or go backward. He is taken toward what he knows he is obliged to pursue. On a literal level, it is his duty as a physician, but figuratively he is taken toward the inevitability of his own death. The symbolism is emphasized further when the doctor describes feeling overwhelmed and powerless while hearing the sound of his home being destroyed behind him and his servant girl being attacked, indicating that he has nothing to return to.

“[T]here was no giddying up about it. We dragged through the snowy desert like old men.”

The theme of inescapable mortality is explored further when the doctor attempts to return home after fleeing the home of his patient. Although he expects the trip to be similar to his earlier journey which magically took only moments, the doctor is horrified to find that this leg of the journey is relentlessly slow to the point where he’s forced to face the knowledge that he will never make it back home. The inexorable trip is a juxtaposition with the speediness of his earlier journey. Unlike childhood and adulthood which go by quickly, the trudge toward accepting old age and death is an interminable process. The presence of the snowy landscape underscores the idea that the doctor is in the winter season of his life, and he’s traveling without any clothes. His nakedness represents his vulnerability and serves as a bitter parallel to the state in which all humans come into the world and leave it.

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