Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Woyzeck, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human Nature
Secrecy, Paranoia, and Betrayal
Poverty and Suffering
Character vs. Circumstance
Summary
Analysis
On the street, the captain runs after the doctor. He catches up to the doctor and tells him to slow down—it’s not good for him to walk so fast. The doctor replies that he’s in a hurry. The captain confesses that he’s been so depressed lately that even looking at his coat makes him cry. The doctor observes the captain’s appearance and guesses that he’s developing apoplexia cerebri. The condition might paralyze the captain. In the best-case scenario, it might only affect his brain. If the captain’s tongue becomes paralyzed, however, it’ll make him an especially great test subject.
The doctor dehumanizes the captain just as he dehumanized Woyzeck in the previous scene, prioritizing his professional pursuits and the possibility of fame over the captain’s wellbeing. While other characters, like the barker in an earlier scene, suggest that people from lower social classes represent a lower form of humanity, the doctor is an amoral fool despite his respectable, middle-class status.
Themes
Just then, Woyzeck comes rushing by. The captain notices and orders him to stop, remarking that Woyzeck “runs through the world like an open razor[.]” Then he asks Woyzeck if he’s found any human hairs in his soup lately, like the hairs of a sergeant or drum major, for example. But that situation would be impossible, the captain muses ironically, since Marie is such an “honest” woman. Woyzeck, suddenly furious, asks the captain what he’s implying. The doctor feels Woyzeck’s pulse, which is racing. The captain insists he's only telling Woyzeck all this because Woyzeck is such a good man.
Both the captain and the doctor ridicule and criticize Woyzeck for being tense and unsettled all the time, yet they actively goad him, insinuating that his suspicions about Marie and the drum major are true. The captain’s claim that he’s only telling Woyzeck about Marie’s infidelity because Woyzeck is a good man comes off as mocking and insincere: in their previous interaction, the captain claimed that Woyzeck, although a good man, had no morals. According to that line of thinking, Woyzeck’s relationship with the unmarried Marie is already immoral, so the captain’s motivation for telling Woyzeck about Marie’s infidelity can only be to upset or humiliate him.
Themes
“The bitch,” Woyzeck mutters. He looks up at the overcast sky, noting how it makes a person want to hang themselves. Then he runs off. The captain notes how fast Woyzeck runs. “Grotesque, grotesque!” he laments.
The captain’s lament of “Grotesque, grotesque!” dehumanizes Woyzeck, trivializing the depth of Woyzeck’s emotional torment. He implies that there is something unseemly about Woyzeck’s emotional response to learning of Marie’s infidelity, yet he fails to consider the abjectly unfortunate and heartbreaking circumstances that have caused Woyzeck to react as he has.
Themes
