Essay Questions

What is it specifically that the officer finds so disturbing about the orderly?

As both a Prussian and a military officer, the older man is situated as a representative of control, authority, protocol and self-awareness. His physical description suggests the consequences of this sort of personality with its focus on “the irritable tension of his brow, which gave him the look of a man who fights with life.” He is at every turn contrasted with the more open emotional tenor of the younger orderly which he finds simultaneously attractive and repulsive. The attraction to the younger man’s joie de vivre is also dual edged in that it repulses him and also repulses himself for finding it attractive. Ultimately, the narrative boils down to an essential, singular truth the reasoning behind the officer’s violent hatred of the youth: “it was rather the blind, instinctive sureness of movement of an unhampered young animal that irritated the officer to such a degree.”

How is the story a representation of “Nietzschean” dualities?

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proposed that mankind exists upon a plane of oppositional dichotomy in which most can be separated into one of two camps. The Apollonian represents logic, reasoning, order and a lack of emotional impulse in decision-making. The Dionysian is the exact opposite: emotional, chaotic, irrational and doomed to enslavement at the hands of the Apollonian. Yet Nietzsche also strongly implies that one cannot exist without the other; Apollonian and Dionysian personalities are symbiotic, so intricately dependent upon the other that one neither can be complete on its own. Clearly the officer is the symbol of the Apollonian and the orderly is that of the Dionysian. That both die in the end ultimately confirms the Nietzschean proposition that one is empty and vacant without the other even as both bound together are inexorably doomed to unending conflict.

Is this a story about sadism or masochism?

That there is a strong underlying foundation of sadomasochism in the relationship between the older and younger man is certainly beyond any serious debate. Where it becomes tricky is whether this is a story that is really more about sadism or masochism. On the surface things seem clear enough: the officer uses his authority to enact a sadistic torture upon the orderly which in turn results in the orderly indulging in that torture to the point of seemingly masochistic pleasure. The pretense of violation of order which leads to the violent confrontation between the two, however, is strongly suggestive that the apparent sadism of the officer has all along been directed inward. For seemingly no logical reason, the officer pushes and pushes the limits of what the orderly can be expected to take and it certainly cannot come as any sort of shock that he eventually reaches a breaking point. There is in the murder a sense of relief and release on the part of the officer, the kind of relief and release usually associated with suicide. It also seems equally irrational to suspect such depth of guile on the officer’s part that he would assume the orderly murdering him would result in masochistic grief rather than sadistic glory and triumph. And yet each man dies less as a result of sadistic impulses than of sadism turned inward upon the self.