In the Penal Colony (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Franz Kafka
- First Published: 1919
- Type of Plot: Allegory
- Time of Work: The early twentieth century
- Setting: A penal colony on an island in an unspecified, remote region of the world
- Principal Characters: An explorer, An officer
- Genres: Short fiction, Allegory, Fantasy
- Subjects: Justice, Sin or Original sin, Religion, Criticism, Torture, Penal colonies, Secularism, Exploration or explorers, Naturalists, Machinery
- Locales: Islands
The Story
An explorer arrives in a penal colony, at the invitation of its new commandant, to investigate its organization and report his findings to a commission created by the commandant. Franz Kafka calls the explorer Forschungsreisende, a “research traveler,” and in the story's context he is clearly more than an amateur: He is an enlightened modern naturalist and relativist, trained to observe and analyze dispassionately the customs of diverse cultures—such comparative anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) come to mind.
The explorer is...
[The entire page is 1607 words long]
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