Search results
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.
- Franz Kafka
- 1919
A story of a man who visits a remote island where a brutal execution device is used to inscribe the condemned person's crime on their body. The story explores themes of autobiography, politics, and theology, and foreshadows the horrors of totalitarian regimes.
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.
Learn about Kafka's surreal and tragic short story of a visitor to an island penal colony and an officer who executes men with a machine. Find a full story summary, analysis of the Traveler, and main ideas in this SparkNotes guide.
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.
A story by Franz Kafka about a machine that writes a prisoner's sentence on his body. The explorer witnesses the execution and questions the cruel and arbitrary justice of the penal colony.
