ELIZABETH DALTON
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concerned with transgression and punishment. Psychoanalysis has a
name for this place , which is not exactly a place but a way of func–
tioning.
It
is the unconscious, and more particularly the superego .
In this superego , however, the wish to punish and the need to suffer
are out of control. Here an obsession with authority and a puritani–
cal hatred of sin are linked with exciting fantasies of torture, of a
body forced to yield up its last secrets with stifled screams . The body
turns out finally to be that of the torturer himself.
The personnel of the story - the officer and the explorer, the
condemned man and the soldier-are all men, all apparently rather
young. They are "characters" only in a special and limited sense.
Like all of Kafka's human beings, they lack the complex and con–
tradictory qualities of persons in real life or even in realistic fiction.
Rather, they have the bright flatness of the figures in dreams . They
represent not whole persons, but aspects of a single conflicted self.
The story can be understood, then, as dramatizing an internal
struggle among parts of a personality. Indeed, the three principal
figures - the explorer, the officer (of whom the soldier seems mainly
an agent), and the condemned man - resemble in some respects the
three parts of Freud's topographical conception of the mind.
The explorer is the central character, from whose perspective
the events of the story are seen and who must make a decision about
them . A visitor to the colony, he is horrified by its practices, yet also
fascinated , strangely silent, obscurely implicated. He is a kind of ego
figure, a rational social self that moves in the outside world as well as
in this inner world of suffering and punishment.
The most striking figure in the story is the officer. A fanatical
disciplinarian , he is like a superego gone berserk, at once terrifying
and absurd in his rapt devotion to the refinements of torture, his
willing slavery to the dictates of the Old Commandant, his indif–
ference to the realities of history and change. When the explorer
observes that the uniforms of the colony are too heavy for the
tropics, the officer replies, "But they mean home to us: we don't want
to forget about home." The superego itself, like a rigid, inhibiting
uniform, reminds us of home, of childhood and the arbitrary prohi–
bitions of the parents , utterly at odds with the requirements of adult
life, yet homelike, familiar, something to be stubbornly maintained
against the threat of some still more painful inner chaos .
The other significant character is the condemned man , "a
stupid-looking wide-mouthed creature" who fell asleep on sentry
duty. When his captain, another devotee of military punctilio like
