Penal colony

In Kafka’s one of the famous stories, In The Penal Colony, Kafka depicts an island which is transforming from an honor-based society to a right-based society. the story depicts an explorer, who came from a right-based society, visit an officer who held traditional, honor-based beliefs. While most of the story is about an officer, who is the only one believing the old policies, explaining an apparatus to an explorer, the machine unveils an judicial system that is not only cruel and outdated, but also unjust, corrupted, and meaningless. Indeed, the story describes that such penal system have the same result as the machine’s, where it eventually collapses and destroys itself, and a new right-based society will be formed. One of the reason that…

Philosophers have debated what the meaning of life is; people have also sought equality for centuries. In Kafka’s works, “In the Penal Colony” and “The Metamorphosis”, there is an emphasis on unquestionably following society’s rules resulting in flaws which accompany doing so; mainly injustice resulting from superior authority and the issue of existentialism which arises from being rejected from society, respectively. Kafka demonstrates this through an allegory of religion and the unfulfilled…

In the Penal Colony - Franz Kafka Short Story, Fiction In the Penal Colony portrays a conventional, human protagonist who ventures through a judicially corrupt colony (the Penal Colony). This character the narrator titles as the Traveler. The Traveler observes the negative impact totalitarianism takes on humanity, as he explores an island community run purely off justice enforced by a single torture apparatus. I believe the main idea revolving around this text is totalitarianism and its issue…

Kafka’s story "In the Penal Colony" - as a symbolic historical meditation on the origins of punishment, can be demonstrated by comparing certain aspects of this story to Nietzsche’s essay "On the Genealogy of Morals" - which offers a historical account of the origins of punishment and justice. Nietzsche’s essay discusses how humans transform from pre-civilized, e.g., humans in their primal state with little regard for social-obligations; to civilized, e.g., those who comply and conform to the…

where Dostoyevsky decides to end the story. As a result the reason that Dostoyevsky wrote this could be because he had the same thoughts as the underground man because he was going through a challenging time of being in debt and dealing with grief. Dostoyevsky wrote this story because there are people who have to live with this kind of life and the way that he just describes the underground man for how he thinks about every thought that crosses his mind in a logical way which makes him change…

Anyone who reads In the Penal Colony by Kafka cannot fail but noticing what is called the apparatus. This huge machine, described by the Officer as perfect and wonderful, and arguably perceived by most readers as horrible and disgusting. The machine is basically an instrument of death; executions are carried out using the machine to carve into the condemned man's flesh a sentence that represents the lesson he needs to learn. The machine appears very complex and well constructed for its purpose.…

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 Angola Rodeo, a tradition held annually in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, is an event inmates die for. Danger not only subsists in the race itself, but also in the fact that the rodeo doesn’t seem problematic on the surface. The inmates are completely aware of the risks which they are willing to take on for their own fun; they even sign a legal release indicating their free will and waiving culpability of the State of Louisiana. Not only so, it’s a scarce opportunity for them to feel…

The nation known as the Commonwealth of Australia was a colony of the British Empire and then its own independent state, this can be traced with the settlers from other parts of the world, namely those from Europe and Great Britain. I will focus on the immigrants who went to the continent of Australia and its development as a colony then how it became a nation. In particular, there will be a concentration on how mining and prospecting interest help cultivate Australia as we know it today. This…

I will be writing my term paper on Franz Kafka and the theme of how one’s spirituality transcends their physical concerns. Three of his works which display this theme are “The Metamorphosis”, “A Hunger Artist”, and “In the Penal Colony”. In Kafka’s works, often times a single, specific philosophy or message can be difficult to identify as a lot of his stories revolve around a disorderly universe, resulting in existential crises. These chaotic worlds Kafka places his characters in causes them to…