Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”
Let’s start this year’s series off with a classic, which also happens to be my favorite Kafka story (in close competition with “The Hunger Artist”). “In the Penal Colony” is, like so much of Kafka’s work, both an all-purpose metaphor and a specific, chilling portrait of cruelty, bureaucratic monstrosity, and human derangement. In it, a visitor to an unnamed land is “treated” to a demonstration of a certain machine—used to torture and execute anyone who has broken a rule by continually etching said rule into their skin—by its obsessive operator. But we slowly discover the true nature of the machine, and the operator, things begin to shift…
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