Abstract

This paper explores the metaphorical and psychoanalytic dimensions of consumption and predation in Niq Mhlongo‘s Dog Eat Dog, a post-apartheid campus novel that dramatizes the existential anxieties of black youth in transitional South Africa. The titular metaphor (―dog eat dog‖) is unpacked as a symbolic framework for understanding the psychic economy of survival, competition, and alienation in neoliberal urban spaces. Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, the study examines how characters internalize and project trauma, desire, and repression through acts of metaphorical ―eating‖—from institutional exploitation to interpersonal betrayal. The research problem centers on how metaphorical consumption reflects deeper psychic wounds and sociopolitical disappointment. Methodologically, the paper employs close textual analysis, supported by psychoanalytic theory and postcolonial critique. Findings suggest that Mhlongo‘s novel stages a psychic drama of cannibalistic capitalism, where the university becomes a site of both aspiration and abjection. Dingz, the protagonist, navigates a fractured identity, oscillating between township trauma and urban ambition, revealing the unconscious drives that shape post-apartheid subjectivity. Ultimately, the paper argues that ―who eats whom‖ is not merely a metaphor for power but a lens into the psychic scars of historical violence and neoliberal betrayal.
Keywords: Niq Mhlongo, Dog Eat Dog, Psychoanalysis, Metaphor theory, Post-apartheid literature, Neoliberalism, South African fiction, Cannibalistic capitalism