In reading In the Penal Colony, the traveller portrays himself as a passerby to an execution. Anxieties and fears spark at the end of the story where he finds the grave of the old commandant, who believed in exerting full attention in executions. After reading the inscription, the traveller “rose and saw the men standing round him, smiling as if they had been reading the inscription with him, and finding it ludicrous were challenging him to join them in their view” (99). This shows how the people at the teahouse were secretly hinting at the traveller to embody the executional ideology of the old commandant. The traveller thought that there “was no doubt about the injustice of the procedure and the inhumanity of the execution” (85), so he did
