metamorphosis in the penal colony and other stories

As so often in Kafka's work, we are confronted with a punishment out of all proportion with the offense in this case, the condemned man is supposed to fulfill the senseless duty of saluting in front of his captain's door every hour, thus missing the sleep he needs to serve as sentry during the day. Regardless of the gravity of his offense, capital punishment is the only possible verdict. He has neither the time nor the strength to do anything but continue suffering.

But while the machine may enable the condemned person to 'see' after the sixth hour, it does not offer him a chance to repent and to survive. Everything is as simple as the 'trial' preceding an execution, each cog fulfilling its proper function. Designed to imprint upon a condemned man's back the sin of which he is found guilty, it executes the sentence in the smoothest way possible.

Insight and death go hand in hand, and transfiguration is the reward of those undergoing torture.Īs for the punishment, or torture, however, even the simplicity and precision with which the remarkable 'machine' operates cannot convince us that it is justifiable. Yet there is also a philosophical meaning to this cult of pain. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself.' This is Kafka at his masochistic best. In this story, pain is a major precondition for comprehending one's sins: nobody can decipher the Designer's writing except he who has reached the halfway mark of his ordeal. It was especially Dostoevsky's preoccupation with the interaction between guilt, suffering, and redemption which fascinated Kafka. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, Schopenhauer suggested that it might be helpful to look at the world as a penal colony, and Dostoevsky, whom Kafka re-read in 1914, supplied Kafka with many punishment fantasies. Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky are the two most likely spiritual mentors of this story.

Metamorphosis in the penal colony and other stories