In "A Country Doctor" by Franz Kafka, what do the boy and doctor represent?

As in existentialist literature generally, the protagonists in Kafka's brief story are emblematic of man alone in a hostile universe. This is a description so often given that it may sound banal, but in the early twentieth-century, the themes explored by writers such as Kafka were new, or at least, the treatment of those themes was done in an original way, different from that of literature in the past.
At the beginning of the story, the setting is not an unusual one, where the doctor has to respond to a call from a distant village during a snowstorm. (As a side note, the village is described as ten miles away. In the German-speaking countries, until about the end of the nineteenth-century, the term Kafka uses, Meile (mile), generally meant a distance of about seven and a half kilometers, or about five English miles. This would mean that the ten miles referred to would be about 50 of our miles, a very long distance to travel by horse-drawn carriage. It's possible that, if Kafka is using this traditional measurement, this is one element of the surreal picture he is creating.) The first problem is that his own horse has just died, so he has to borrow horses from a stable lad who appears out of nowhere, hitches two fine horses to the carriage, and then shows all too obviously that he intends to attack the doctor's housekeeper Rosa. But the horses have already started off with the doctor driving, and the doctor has to answer the call at the distant village. Right away the doctor is a victim of uncontrollable forces; he is powerless to help Rosa.
At the house where the sick man is lying in bed, the doctor examines him but first finds nothing wrong, until he sees a wound on the young man's hip, infested with huge worms. The boy has already asked the doctor to let him die. The gruesome insect-like imagery is similar to that in "The Metamorphosis." The doctor is then stripped of his clothes and forced into the bed with the patient. This is symbolic of doctor and patient sharing the same helpless fate. Eventually the doctor escapes the house, with his clothes in a bundle and his fur coat dragging behind the carriage.
The doctor, the sick young man, and Rosa are all victims of irrational, uncontrollable circumstances. The doctor, as an authority figure, seems to be the one who has a degree of comprehension of the absurdity, as he counsels the young man: "You came into the world with a beautiful wound." The absurd happenings do not really seem to surprise the doctor as he rides off into the "desert of snow," reflecting that his practice is now lost, his housekeeper has been attacked, and that he can never come back to his house like this. It is man, defeated by the universe.