By It is so much fun to call things Kafkaesque, and at every opportunity, I will be glad to reference this unique aura that is present in Franz Kafka’s work.
About the Book
Title: “In the Penal Colony”
Author: Franz Kafka
Published: 1918
Series: (standalone)
Genre: classics, philosophy, fiction, short stories
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads) (truncated):
“The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden as an influence. As in some of Kafka’s other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events that one would normally expect to be registered with horror. In the Penal Colony describes the last use of an elaborate torture and execution device that carves the sentence of the condemned prisoner on his skin in a script before letting him die, all in the course of twelve hours”
My Thoughts
It is so much fun to call things Kafkaesque, and at every opportunity, I will be glad to reference this unique aura that is present in Franz Kafka’s work. Every piece of writing that I’ve read from him so far has had a similar surreal, odd, and almost claustrophobic mood, and “In the Penal Colony” was no exception.
I don’t know what made me decide to start with this story from the collection of Kafka’s short stories that I found at a used bookstore, but something about this one made me dive into it first. The short story follows a diplomat/visitor to some foreign country, where a very elaborate torture/execution device is demonstrated to him. The story is very strange and disturbing, and an interesting exploration of what punishment means, whether it is effective, and why society justifies it.
“Many questions were troubling the explorer, but at the sight of the prisoner he asked only: “Does he know his sentence?” “No,” said the officer, eager to go on with his exposition, but the explorer interrupted him: “He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?” “No,” said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: “There would be no point in telling him. He’ll learn it on his body.
Frappes and Fiction 