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The unnamed doctor is the first-person narrator of “The Use of Force.” His absolute yet highly subjective perspective is the lens through which readers view the story’s scenes. While Williams drew on his experience as a pediatrician in this and other writings, the doctor in the story is not Williams himself. He is a fictional character through whose experiences and thoughts Williams explores themes about responsibility, autonomy, and authority.
The doctor presents himself as a man in charge, with the expertise and experience to back up his authority. He has the community’s public health interests in mind and understands the threat of a contagious and often lethal infection. Less flattering is his opinion of individuals in the community he serves. He sees the Olsons as distrustful, uncooperative, and ignorant of how the examination should proceed. But rather than explaining the process, the doctor relies on his authority to order the parents around, and more so with the child, whose stubbornness impresses and frustrates him. When she persistently defies his authority, he admits that he should end the examination, but his own sense of autonomy, masked by medical good judgment and “social necessity,” compels him to violate her self-preserving instinct.
The doctor’s assumptions about why the child resists examination reveal his inability to take her perspective. He believes that she is intentionally misleading her parents about having diphtheria, when the simpler and more age-appropriate explanation is fear of the doctor, perhaps because she associates him with illness and pain. He never pauses to ask Mathilda why she’s afraid, suggesting that his ego, as a trained medical professional and a man, prevents him from understanding the girl’s frantic objections. In this, he demonstrates a lack of empathy and curiosity that makes him an intriguing but flawed protagonist and a somewhat unreliable narrator.
