Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The penal colony essay
The penal colony essay
The penal colony essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The penal colony essay
There will always be issues when dissecting a person’s belief system in contrast to another person’s belief system. Much of this is caused by everyone involved always feeling as if their belief system is the right one. In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka approaches this issues through an explorer who is in a foreign colony, observing an unfamiliar justice system. The entire system is based around a machine, called the apparatus, which always declare the accused as guilty, inscribes the punishment of the accused onto their body, and then slowly kills them. The worst part of all is that this machine is not viewed as inhumane because it allows the person to have a religious epiphany and become a better person. Although Kafka’s short story was written …show more content…
The officer demands that any of the primitive people of the land who are accused of an act, without the right to trial, or even any opportunity to not be guilty, are placed in the machine. Once the machine begins the punishment, which the prisoner may or may not have deserved, is inscribed onto his or her body in a code. Only the officer can translate this code though, leaving all trust in his translation. The machine then kills the prisoner over 12 hours, the first 6 involving excruciating pain, and the last 6 with the prisoner unconscious. This system was put in place by the Old Commandant and is looking to be replaced by the New Commandant, but the officer feels that there is so much good that comes from it. He believes that in the suffering that these prisoners encounter, bring about enlightenment, ultimately changing them. The explorer finds it very difficult to look at these actions as fair though and cannot agree with the …show more content…
This is because Kafka takes on the larger theme of belief systems, and how a person can truly dedicate his or her entire reasoning behind a system that he or she has always been accustomed to, even if morally the system is not sound. That being said, who is to say that a present day person’s set of beliefs are superior to a person in the past, or that the New Commandant is more moral than the Old Commandant. Both have reasons for their actions, reasons that have been instilled through numerous people. Each sides is simply doing the same thing, by comparing their belief to another, and almost always taking the stance that their belief is better than the two. Obviously, it is easy to look at the apparatus and lynching and comprehend how they are immoral, but the important part lies in the fact that the white supremacists and the officer did not view either as immoral. Much of this is based from a person’s definition of justice and moral because so many actions are considered by some as just as others as
In Kafka’s The Penal Colony, the machine is both a symbol of imagine and literal power which also reminds me of the machine that is mentioned in Karen Russell’s Reeling for the Empire who also illustrated it as an embodiment of power. In both stories, the two machines are inanimate objects but for some reason they possess this power and seen as almighty objects even though they aren’t human. In The Fine Line, Zerubavel states that “It is the fact that it is differentiated from other entities that provides an entity with a distinctive meaning as well as a distinctive identity that sets it apart from everything else.” I believe that it means that power, control, and borders only exist if people believe in them.
Kafka’s In the Penal Colony is a story about the use of torture tools which cause death sentences into effect, within 12 hours of torment and the convicted, in the end dies. Lets regard the roots of this subject and its idea of hope....
Janet Gardner, an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, and the author of the textbook “Reading About Literature”, claims that “…the more prominent an image in a story, the more likely it is meant to be read symbolically” (74). I recognize the apparatus as a ¬symbol of control. “Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow…” (169) This statement itself shows that the apparatus is responsible for disciplining the natives. Moreover the “commandment” may also epitomize that the apparatus is a set of laws and beliefs. However, this formulates a hypothetical question. Who gets to be the prisoner? Therefore, it may also be inferred that the apparatus is responsible for the determination of power between the characters. This claim is visibly found on the last scene when the soldier and the condemned man “came rushing after” (192) the explorer when he was about to leave. They were desperate of leaving the island since they know that one of them shall take over the superior responsibility of the former officer to take charge of the apparatus and the other one must accept the inferior role of being
In “The Penal Colony” the life of the officer is solely based on the old commandant’s rules and ideals. His strong obsession of being “involved in the very first experiments and also [sharing] in the work all the way to it completion” (96) Has a deep impact on the officer’s life and beliefs. The officer is not only obsessed with his work but with the old ways that the old commandant made. Also, the fact that he is the last one in the colony that still follow the old ways means that he is going against the whole society in the colony. The new commandant “uses everything as an excuse to attack the old ways” (105).
Most prisoners that are in prison now are more than likely to be free one day where some will spend the rest of their living life there. When they enter into the prison system, they lose more than just being able to wear what they want. They even lose more than just their civil liberties. Gresham Sykes was the first to outline these major deprivations that prisoners go through in his book The Society of Captives. His five major pains, which he calls “pains of imprisonment”, were loss of liberty, loss of autonomy, loss of security, deprivation of heterosexual relationships, and deprivation of goods and services. Matthew Robinson adds onto Sykes’ five pains with three more of his own. His additional pains are loss of voting rights, loss of dignity,
We see that the author’s purpose is to allow the readers to understand that the prisoners were not treated humanly, and allows us to see the negative attitudes the authority had towards the prisoners.
There are many different factors that play a role in shaping one’s life. Two of these, family and society, are expressed by Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka. Tolstoy’s novella The Death Of Ivan Ilyich draws attention to the quality of Ivan Ilyich’s life. Although he has a life the whole community aspires to, he becomes aware of the hypocrisies and imperfections that accompany it. Similarly, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis focuses on the ostracized life of Gregor Samsa who continuously seeks the approval of his family, but somehow always ends up letting them down. Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis both experience extreme alienation from their families, and thereby shed light on the nightmarish quality of their existence.
as a form of hired help since he had taken the job to pay for his
To fully understand this story, it’s important to have some background information on Franz Kafka. He was born into a German speaking family in Prague on July 3rd, 1883. He was the oldest of six children. His father Harmann Kafka was a business man. His mother Julie Kafka was born into a wealthy family. Kafka considered the vast differences in his paternal and maternal relatives as a “split within himself” (Sokel 1). Kafka felt that “the powerful, self-righteous, and totally unselfconscious personality of his father had stamped him with an ineradicable conviction of his own inferiority and guilt” (Sokel 1). He felt the o...
The prison system in the United States was not always like it is today. It took mistakes and changes in order to get it to the point it is at. Some people think that prisons should still be being changed while others feel that they are fine the way they are. It is hard to make an argument for one side or the other if one does not know about the history of prisons as well as the differences between prisons structures and differences in prison management. Knowledge of private prisons is also needed to make this difficult decision.
...Once more the odious courtesies began, the first handed the knife across K. to the second, who handed it across K. back again to the first. K. now perceived clearly that he was supposed to seize the knife himself, as it traveled from hand to hand above him, and plunge it into his own breast. But he did not do so, he merely turned his head, which was still free to move, and gazed around him. He could not completely rise to the occasion, he could not relieve the officials of all their tasks; the responsibility for this last failure of his lay with him who had not left him the remnant of strength necessary for the deed....
Hunger is a term that is often defined as the physical feeling for the need to eat. However, the Hunger Artist in Kafka's A Hunger Artist places a different, more complex meaning to this word, making the Hunger Artist's name rather ironic. The hunger of the Hunger Artist is not for food. As described at the end of the essay, the Hunger Artist states that he was in fact never hungry, he just never found anything that he liked. So then, what does this man's hunger truly mean? What drives the Hunger Artist to fast for so long, if he is truly not hungry? The Hunger Artist salivates not for the food which he is teased with, nor does he even sneak food when he alone. The Hunger Artist has a hunger for fame, reputation, and honor. This hunger seems to create in the mind of the Artist, a powerfully controlling dream schema. These dreams drive the Artist to unavoidable failure and alienation, which ultimately uncovers the sad truth about the artist. The truth is that the Artist was never an artist; he was a fraudulent outcast who fought to the last moment for fame, which ultimately became a thing of the past.
In Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K. is guilty; his crime is that he does not accept his own humanity. This crime is not obvious throughout the novel, but rather becomes gradually and implicitly apparent to the reader. Again and again, despite his own doubts and various shortcomings, K. denies his guilt, which is, in essence, to deny his very humanity. It is for this crime that the Law seeks him, for if he would only accept the guilt inherent in being human (and, by so doing, his humanity itself), both he and the Law could move on.
Neumann, Gerhard. "The Judgement, Letter to His Father, and the Bourgeois Family." Trans. Stanley Corngold. Reading Kafka. Ed. Mark Anderson. New York: Schocken, 1989. 215-28.
ii Kafka, F. The Trial. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir. Introduction by George Steiner. New York, Schocken Books, 1992, 1.