In the Penal Colony Essay Questions

Is the Traveller inside or outside the penal colony's system of power?

At first it seems as if the Traveller is emphatically outside of the system of power. He is a foreigner, only in the penal colony at the New Commandant's invitation. He is horrified by the apparatus and plans to tell the Commandant so; thus, it seems as if he is a product of a culture that has more humane values and forms of discipline and punishment. Interestingly, though, he and the Officer both speak French, and seem to have a more intuitive understanding of one another. The Traveller also refuses to participate in any meetings or denounce the apparatus publicly. And at the very end, he refuses to allow the victims of this system—the Soldier and the Condemned Man—to escape with him. He can thus best be seen as an outsider who, by virtue of his ultimate silence, helps propagate the power system on the inside.

Why don't the characters have real names?

Readers realize from the very first line of the story that Kafka's characters are barely that—they are types, not individuals. Critic Daniela Stoica refers to them as "mere labels for social bodies as well as for the relations of power established between them." The Old Commandant is no longer in power but the designation of "old" also denotes past authority and tradition. The New Commandant steps into a pre-made system but, by virtue of the word "New," we can see that he has fresh ideas. The Officer is a tool of the power structure, as is the Soldier. Stoica writes, "[the Officer] may be interpreted as standing in for laws and rules, but [he] may also symbolize the culture, or the 'symbolic medium' in which each human is born and moves." The Condemned Man is perhaps the biggest cipher of all; he has no identity, no personality. He is nothing but the universal subject/criminal/peon/oppressed. The Traveller is identified immediately as an outsider. Overall, Kafka keeps his characters general to give them universal significance.

Why does critic Richard Gray use the term "fractured dialectic" to discuss the story? What does he mean?

Gray's critical work focuses on an aspect of the text that readers may even realize intuitively—that it can be read both literally and figuratively, that there is something in the relationships between the characters that is just off, and that real communication is practically non-existent. He wants to show how in this postmodern world, there is no one narrative; the Officer's narrative and the language he uses to tell that narrative are completely at odds with the reality of the situation in the penal colony. The Officer and the Traveller do not pick up on each other's cues and "seem to run on parallel tracks in a Euclidean world, so that they tend to speak or even think past one another." Their dialectic is thus fractured, and there is no way to achieve resolution or a happy or even unhappy synthesis. Both men in their roles as interpreters "simply [ascribe] a meaning to the signs of the other so that these willingly confirm the significance the interpreter wants them to have;" an example of this is the Officer's assumption that the Traveller's quick wave of the hand means he should go on talking about the machine as he wants to do. Overall, Kafka probes the nature of ideological blindness, of "narrative [being] revealed to be mere discourse that finds no confirmation in experiential reality."

How do the three parts of the apparatus replicate the nature of the modern sign?

In his trenchant analysis of the nature of the dialectic between the Officer and the Traveller, Gray also provides an analysis of the apparatus that helps illustrate some of the larger themes of the text. He explains how the three parts—Bed, Inscriber, Harrow—correspond to the threefold nature of the modern sign. The inscriber "manifests the conceptual signified, the 'transcendental' meaning that must be communicated." The Harrow is the writing instrument and thus the "medium, the signifier, by means of which the signified content will be transmitted." The Bed is a "placeholder for the interpretant." And, because the machine etches the signifier onto the skin of the interpretant, the signifier and interpretant are one. This was the Old Commandant's dream: complete and immediate and flawless transmission of the signifier onto/into the interpretant. To be more precise, the Condemned Man will immediately receive the message of his error and be the message of the error. The fact that this is done through violation and violence asserts the problem with fervid adherence to ideology and the resulting abuse of power.

Is the story funny? How?

"In the Penal Colony" certainly isn't a straightforward comedy, in the sense that the events depicted are utterly horrifying and the themes are of the abuses of power and the ways in which the body becomes an instrument of the state in the latter's quest to retain and expand power. Not exactly rip-roaringly funny, right? However, there is a way to view the story in light of the absurd, of the laugh in the face of the void. Critic Malynne Sternstein begins her article on this topic with a reference to how Kafka himself always laughed at inopportune moments during readings of his work—particularly those moments when something horrible was happening to his hero. She recalls how writer Milan Kundera claimed that the novel was full of "God's laughter at man thinking" and how Sarah in the Old Testament laughed at God's ironies and was not punished. Kafka's characters are similar to Sarah. His "comic figures are those of Job, Prometheus, Christ, Adam, and Satan, the exiled angel. His laugh, like Sarah's, incorporates all the semantic field of laughability: joy, absurdity, irony, mockery." Kafka directs his ironic humor to the social order, to people who claim that order. Ultimately, such irony is not alienating but rather sympathetic. Kafka's work is funny indeed, but in a bleak fashion.