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Synopsis. The story focuses on the Traveler, who has just arrived in an island penal colony and is encountering its brutal execution machine for the first time. Everything about the functioning of the intricate machine and its purpose and history is told to him by the Officer.
‘In the Penal Colony’: summary. A man identified only as the Traveller arrives at an island penal colony. He is being shown an execution device, whose purpose and operation are explained to him by a man known as the Officer. There are two other characters: the Soldier and the Condemned.
A traveler in a penal colony witnesses a complex torture and execution machine that writes in the flesh of prisoners with needles, before letting them die.
In the Penal Colony. by Franz Kafka (1919) Translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC downloaded from http://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/kafka/ “It’s a peculiar apparatus,” said the Officer to the Traveller, gazing with a certain admiration at the device, with which he was, of course, thoroughly familiar.
“In the Penal Colony” is the story of a visitor to an unnamed island penal colony and an officer who proudly explains his process of executing men with no trial or even an explanation of charges to those accused.
In the Penal Colony, novella by Franz Kafka, written in 1914 and published in German as In der Strafkolonie in 1919. An allegorical fantasy about law and punishment, it was also viewed as an existential comment on human torment and on strict devotion to an ambiguous task.
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