The Prussian Officer Literary Elements

Short story, realist fiction

Late 19th century to early 20th century Imperial Germany, the setting is southern Germany, possibly Bavaria.

An omniscient, third-person narrator who provides access to the characters’ inner feelings.

oppressive, charged with powerful emotions, overflowing with conflicts, tragic.

The orderly is the protagonist, who only wants to be a good servant and to lead a free-spirited, unself-conscious life. He lives a peaceful existence and merely wants to get through his days without incidents. The captain is the antagonist. He is secretly attracted the orderly. As a result of this fatal attraction, the captain suffers considerable emotional disturbance and unleashes his anger upon the orderly through a series of violent physical and verbal abuses.

The captain wants to lead the life of an emotionally repressed disciplinarian. However, his mind is becoming increasingly susceptible towards the charms of his orderly.

The captain subjects the orderly to violent beating. For the first time, the orderly became conscious of the captain’s homosexual attraction towards himself. This epiphany completely shattered his emotional equilibrium and sets him onto the path of violence and self-destruction.

The orderly’s admiration towards the captain’s fine physique, foreshadows the attraction that is about to form between these two men.

The captain’s physical attraction towards the orderly is being understated, so is the orderly’s growing consciousness towards the captain’s desires. Any graphic description of sexual attraction is forbidden in the literary works of this period.

The orderly’s transformation alludes to the fall of man in biblical tales. The orderly’s life is transformed from a state of innocence into a state of self-awareness. Before the orderly’s transformation, he was like Adam in the Garden of Eden. His behavior was innocent, instinctive and devoid of self-consciousness. After his repeated physical encounters with the captain, he gains a profound sense of self-awareness, similar to Adam’s newly acquired insight. This new knowledge shattered his equilibrium and led to his fall of grace.

There is a vivid description of the orderly’s body. His body merits a careful dissection because it will soon become the captain’s obsession and the cause of the story’s tragedy.

As the captain’s physical attraction towards the orderly increases, so is his resentment towards him.

The officer and the orderly can be seen as parallel characters. Both of them have an acute sense of class consciousness. Both of them are disciplinarian who shrink from physical and emotional interactions. Both of them nursed a latent homosexual feeling. When the two men are laid to rest side by side, the parallelism of their characters is made even clearer.

The “patch of light blue and scarlet” is a synecdoche for German soldiers. The light blue and scarlet are the colours of the German uniforms. However, there exists a powerful connection between German soldiers and these colours, so as to make the blue and scarlet colour a synecdoche.
The word “figure” is a metonymy for the captain. As the orderly becomes increasingly isolated, he is forced to live in an ever narrowing space, until the captain becomes the only person in his life. Therefore, whenever the orderly observes a figure, the audience knows that it can only be the captain’s figure. Since the captain had become the only being in the orderly’s world.

Towards the end of the story, the birds and the squirrel are invested with human characteristics.