Dec 23, 2009

In the Penal Colony | In the Penal Colony

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]

In the Penal Colony | In the Penal Colony

At a glance:

The Story

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