'In the Penal Colony' by Franz Kafka is a short story that delves into themes of horror, darkness, and the human psyche. The story revolves around an elaborate torture machine and a commander who is obsessed with it to honor the commander before him who created it. The central image is described as brilliantly grotesque and darkly funny, creating an unsettling and absorbing atmosphere for the readers. The writing style is noted to be jarring, graphic, and memorable, with themes of guilt, fear, punishment, retribution, and the desperation of the common man in the face of power.
From The Publisher:
'The condemned man looked so doggishly submissive, it really seemed as if one might allow him to roam the slopes freely, and only needed to whistle when it was time for the execution, and he would come.'
Kafka transformed the possibilities of the short story, his unique imagination giving his dark tales a sense of dream-like logic and unreality, in which their horrors are humorous and unease pervades. In these two stories, a traveller is shown the workings of an elaborate machine with a bloody purpose, and a son awakens unimagined resentments in his father.
This book includes In the Penal Colony and The Judgement.
Ratings (9)
Incredible (3) | |
Loved It (3) | |
Liked It (2) | |
It Was OK (1) |
Reader Stats (12):
Read It (9) | |
Want To Read (3) |
What can you read after
In the Penal Colony?
About the Author:
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a Jewish family in Prague. In 1906 he received a doctorate in jurisprudence, and for many years he worked a tedious job as a civil service lawyer investigating claims at the State Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. He never married, and published only a few slim volumes of stories during his lifetime. Meditation, a collection of sketches, appeared in 1912; The Stoker: A Fragment in 1913; Metamorphosis in 1915; The Judgement in 1916; In the Penal Colony in 1919; and A Country Doctor in 1920. The great novels were not published until after his death from tuberculosis: America, The Trial and The Castle.
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