The Officer As A Jesus Figure In In The Penal Colony

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“Purification unto Death”:The Officer as a Jesus Figure in In the Penal Colony Most short stories deal with change and the plot is the force driving that change. In the Penal Colony, by Franz Kafka, is about the changing of governorship and most importantly, one officer's inability to adapt. Once the Explorer declines to help the Officer continue his executions, the Explorer reports to the Commandment. The Officer chooses to kill himself in order to spare the Condemned in an ironic but messianic way; however, the Officer's intentions go astray when the machine slaughters him as opposed to giving him a chance to appreciate the religious experience that the drawn out torment may enable. This turn of action by the Officer is Kafka’s way of explaining …show more content…

Since the Officer picks torture to experience the religious experience through a “slow death”, this Christ figure is self-serving, deserting his post because of the dissatisfactions that encompass him. The possibility of a spared life is brought when the Explorer does not permit the the Soldier and the Condemned man to leave the island with him. This has significant ramifications about the life after salvation, and possibly it has suggestions about the afterlife and the dissatisfactions that this expectation conveys to this life. Life may have some otherworldly purpose, some spiritual experience in the last breathe of one’s life, something to validate the dissatisfaction of life. This short story raises the question of whether the reader is persuaded by this contention, and Kafka tries it by making the Officer die in a way that hinders his claim. Even being represented as a Christ like figure no further deed is done because no one follows or care, for that matter, about the Officer’s passing. It’s the bittersweet, halfway belief that exists today in religion and the belief of Jesus

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