Knives, Blades, and Stabbings Symbol Analysis

In Woyzeck, the play’s many references to knives, blades, stabbings foreshadow Woyzeck’s murder of Marie. In its obvious foreshadowing of Woyzeck’s final act of violence, the play frames the act as somehow fated. By extension, then, the play’s references to knives, blades, and stabbings symbolize Woyzeck’s lack of agency over his life.

From the play’s opening scene, which features Woyzeck and Andres splitting wood in the fields outside town, it’s implied that Woyzeck will commit some act of violence. From there, the references to knives and stabbings only grow more obvious—and more obviously tied to Woyzeck’s eventual murder of Marie. At one point, Marie muses that she “could stab [her]self” for her sinful affair with the drum major. Woyzeck, meanwhile, begins to suffer aural hallucinations that tell him to “stab the she wolf dead.” These hallucinations continue—and grow more insistent—until Woyzeck finally acts on them, purchasing a knife and using it to stab Marie to death beside a pond outside town. Given the abundant scenes that have foreshadowed the brutal act, Woyzeck’s murder of Marie hardly comes as a surprise—indeed, Woyzeck’s murder of Marie seems to have been written in stone from the play’s opening scene. In this way, then, knives represent the (real or perceived) lack of agency Woyzeck has over his fate, which, the play suggests, is governed instead by forces outside Woyzeck’s control—whether by his low social status, his poverty, or by human instincts he can neither suppress nor predict.