David Herbert Lawrence “The Prussian officer”. Critical analysis.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

”Ichabod” by John Greenleaf Whittier

In the story “The Prussian officer” by David Herbert Lawrence the subconscious becomes a realm of repressed passions. It results in uncontrollable forces that lead to the severe conflict between the two main characters: the aristocratic Captain and his simple orderly. Lawrence weaves these forces together throughout the story. The forces unfold in a logical progression of events. First, the class separation and military rank division provide the necessary conditions for the perverse conflict to develop between the Captain and his orderly. His position of military and social dominance makes possible the manifestation of the Captain's passion for his orderly. Finally, the orderly's repressed feelings, which result from his continued and inevitable subjugation from the Captain, lead to the revolt and ultimate destruction of the being.

The theme of the story is that inability to control one’s feelings and emotions, even in very stressful situations, may cause a real tragedy.

We can find all forms of discourse in the story – narration is represented in actions, description of nature or characters’ feelings, character drawing in dialogs. The story falls into 4 parts. The first one is an introductory one and it stands for the exposition and rising action. This part has a framing composition; it is both the beginning and the end of the chapter. The second one is the climax of the story, where the orderly commits a murder. The third one is falling action, the orderly’s throes of conscience, agony and death. In the forth part, which is the dénouement, we see the funeral of both main characters, death soothed their suffering and united them.

The whole story is based on oppositions. The one that runs all through the story is the opposition between man and nature. The poetic description on p. 82 gives us the idea of it, underlines the certain hierarchy, that nature is eternal, closer to heaven, the man is transient. In the exposition we find lots of epithets that help to describe the nature. They are full of subjective connotation (glistening sky implies the “suffocating” heat, “pale blue” and “very still” mountains have an implication of comfort and contrast to the fuss of people).  In the end we can find lots of repetitions (gold, golden p. , pure, pure out) and words of the one semantic field (glisten, radiant, lustrous gleaming) that show the divinity of nature, multicoloured and bright description, its purity is opposed to the real dark bottoms of human soul (“golden light behind golden-green glitterings…”; “snow…like pure, soft gold”). 

Another very important opposition is the one between the protagonist (the orderly) and the antagonist (the officer).  The captain is “a tall man about forty” with a “handsome, finely knit figure”, “reddish brown, stiff hair”, “full brutal mouth”, “light blue eyes…flashing with cold fire”. From the explicit and implicit details in this description we can conclude that the officer is a hot-tempered (reddish, brutal), but disciplined (stiff) man. The oxymoron “cold fire” foregrounds that he is a very controversial character. Such implicit details as “deep lines in his face”, “irritable tension of his brow” hint at the concealing and suppression of the feelings, struggle within oneself. But unlike the officer, the orderly had “dark, expressionless eyes, that seemed never to have thought”, he “received life direct through the senses, and acted straight from instinct.” The author dwells upon the idea of the naturalness and freedom of the servant using the metaphoric repetition “movements of an unhampered animal”. The author foregrounds the idea of body and especially the young body of the orderly throughout the narration (“fine figure”, “handsome figure”, “the movement of his strong young shoulders”, “fine fingers crisped”) that may be the originated from homosexual attraction firstly in the officer and then in the orderly. Something undiscovered in the Captain's subconscious makes him aware of his orderly as “free and self-contained”, and this “irritated the Prussian.” We can find many times throughout the text, words that belong to the semantic field of irritation and anger of the officer (“irritated the officer”, “grew madly irritable”, “going irritably insane”, etc) that show the intensification of feelings. The Captain was almost dead, “unliving” , “he didn’t choose to be touched into life” and that caused his annoyance. 

The tension is growing as the narration proceeds. The “could not rest when the soldier was away, and when he was present, he glared at him with tormented eyes”. As the result of incessant psychological attacks, bulling and humiliation the orderly looses his freedom and naturalness (“like a wild thing caught” , he feels like “put out of existence”, while the officer becomes “firmer and prouder with life” . Thus the main conflict of the story is based on nullification of a man. 

But the more the orderly is abased the more dependent he becomes, the more he adores his torturer and at the same time he wanted to swap places with him, to be dominant. But because of the difference in social status there was only one way out – a murder. Note, the foregrounded repetition when the officer looked at his soldiers (“It pleased him”, “the command pleased him”). When the orderly is killing his captain we find “it was pleasant…to have that chin”, “it pleased…to repress”, “it pleased to keep his hands pressing…” . That is satisfaction of the desire to be dominant, but just a momentary satisfaction (“It was a pity it was broken”) and relief (“His heart was satisfied”, “It was extinguished now”). We find an oxymoron “heavy relief” that denotes a mixture of feelings. But then the torments of conscience, remorse come. We see nullification, exhaustion, he wants only “to lie down and not to be disturbed”. The author uses lots of parallel constructions (“he was sick with pain”,“he was sick”), hyperbole, metaphors (“a big pulse of sickness beat in him as if it throbbed through the whole earth”) to show the destruction of his being, moral and physical decomposition. His life ends with the death of the Captain, he becomes a “ghostly shadow”, that can’t come back to the real world. And when he dies in agony both moral and physical pain tortures him.

In the very end we cannot find the contrast between the protagonist and the antagonist, they merged into each other and only opposition to the nature remained (“The mountains…seemed to have it, that which was lost in him”). The loss of honour, of faith, of purity and of soul means death of a human being.