Fiction


Reflections on Kafka’s “Penal Colony”

November 30, 2011

“It was a machine like no other.” With this sentence Franz Kafka opens his metaphorically true story In the Penal Colony. The “machine” is a device that tatoos social imperatives into the skin of those perceived as violating them. The Pioneer (the protagonist of the story, acting in the capacity of a sociologist) shows...
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