'Religious Allegory In Kafka's In The Penal Colony'

There are four major characters in Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony”: the officer, the condemned man (or the prisoner), the soldier, and the explorer. All but one of the men, the explorer, has resided in the penal colony for some time. The explorer, meanwhile, is a visitor, presumably from a more civilized, progressive part of Western Europe as the ruling Commandant gives the explorer special privileges as a “Westerner”. At the end of the story, the explorer leaves the penal colony, leaving the penal colony as it was with its unique justice system in-tact. If we read this story as a religious allegory, we can interpret the explorer’s departure at the end of the story as a reflection of humanity’s unsalvageable detour from our religious origins. Let us establish that this story can be a read as religious allegory for the whole world. In this reading, we develop the following parallels: the penal colony is the world, the Old Commandant is God, the New Commandant is an order which challenges to replace God, the followers of the Old Commandant are strict religious followers, and the followers of the New Commandant are atheists or non-religious followers. There is strong evidence to …show more content…
Thus, repentance and sometimes punishment is required to cleanse of those sins. The apparatus is the way those on the penal colony cleanse their sins, because the inhabitants of the penal colony, like the inhabitants of the world, are already guilty. The new inhabitants, or those who follow the New Commandant, reject the Old Commandant’s teachings and find the apparatus unjust, much like progressive society seems to reject traditional religious teachings. These inhabitants are of the type of people that threaten to eat others. Kafka seems to be saying that those who reject religion degrade to animals and resort to primitive, unconstrained