In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots.
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Dana, Richard Henry. 1959. Two Years Before the Mast. New York: Bantam. 79.
Dana, Two Years. 80.
Dana, Two Years. 78.
Dana, Two Years. 80, 81.
Dana, Two Years. 84.
Melville, Herman. 1959. White Jacket. New York: Grove. 135.
Melville, White Jacket. 138.
Melville, White Jacket. 138.
Melville, White Jacket. 139.
Melville, White Jacket. 142, 350.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. n.d. The House of the Dead. London: Dent. 131.
Dana, Two Years. 80.
Melville, White Jacket. 137.
Dostoevsky, House. 129.
Lawrence, T. E. 1962. Seven Pillars of Wisdom. New York: Dell. 443–444.
Lawrence, Seven Pillars. 444.
Kafka, Franz. 1952. “In the Penal Colony.” In Selected Short Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Modern Library. 100.
Kafka, “Penal Colony.” 97.
Kafka, “Penal Colony.” 103.
Kafka, “Penal Colony.” 102.
Kafka, Franz. 1968. The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken. 87, 84.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 1967. The Idiot. trans. Eva Martin. London: Everyman. 19–20.
Dostoevsky, The Idiot. 56–57.
Timerman, Jacobo. 1982. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Trans. Toby Talbot. London: Penguin. 33.
Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 243–244.
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 243, 248, 253, 257.
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. 267.
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Meyers, J. The Literature of Pain. Hum Rights Rev 8, 409–417 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0021-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-007-0021-7