Summary
The Officer looks brightly at the Traveller and states that it is time. The Traveller is confused. The Officer tells the Condemned Man in his own language that he is free. The Condemned Man is stunned. He shakes a bit on the Bed.
The Officer yells for him not to tear the straps. He orders the Soldier to help him remove them. The Condemned Man looks at all of them while the Soldier helps him out. The Officer walks over to the Traveller and gives him a sheet from the folder of diagrams and instructs him to read it. The Traveller replies that he cannot. The Officer holds it closer and the Traveller tries but still fails. The Officer spells out the inscription and explains that it says, “Be just!” (15). The Traveller still cannot understand but says he sees it.
The Officer is partially satisfied and climbs the ladder, then sets the Inscriber’s gear mechanism. It is tiring work and takes a while. The Traveller is weary and hot. The Soldier helps the Condemned Man with his clothes and the two laugh over the rips and try to amuse each other.
The Officer closes up the Inscriber and climbs down. He wants to wash his hands but the Condemned Man had used the bucket for his dirty clothes. He is dissatisfied. He begins to unbutton his coat, and takes out two ladies’ handkerchiefs stuffed into the collar and tosses them at the Condemned Man.
He undresses speedily but precisely. He throws everything, including his sword and scabbard, into the pit. He is now naked.
The Traveller knows what is about to happen: he is going to subject himself to the apparatus in order to justify his belief in it. The Traveller thinks that “if the judicial process to which the Officer clung was really so close to the point of being canceled…then the Officer was now acting in a completely correct manner” (16).
The Soldier and Condemned Man are playing around and do not seem to notice what is happening until they see the Officer is naked. The Condemned Man thinks this is some sort of revenge for what happened to him, perhaps thanks to the Traveller, and he begins to smile.
The Officer steps to the apparatus and it seems to obey even his slightest touch. His hesitation is only momentary. He does not even need to be strapped down, but the Condemned Man wants him to be, so he and the Soldier come over to do it. The machine starts to work right away. Everything is quiet and the wheel does not even squeak.
The Condemned Man and Soldier watch intently, and the Traveller grows weary of them and orders them away. The Condemned Man begs to stay and drops to his knees. The Traveller is about ready to force him to go when he hears a noise from the Inscriber.
Looking over, he sees the Inscriber’s lid come up and the cogs of a wheel expose themselves; finally the whole wheel appears. Several other gear wheels begin to move up and outward, followed by more and more parts. They fall out of the apparatus into the sand and are still. The gear wheels delight the Condemned Man, who tries to grab each one.
The Traveller is very upset because “obviously the machine was breaking up. Its quiet operation had been an illusion” (18). He looks more closely at the Harrow now and sees that it is not writing but actually stabbing, and the Bed is moving the body up into the needles. It is murder, not torture. Blood flows in hundreds of streams from the body and the water tubes are not working. The body also does not come loose from the needles and it hangs over the pit without falling off; the Harrow remains suspended over the hole.
The Traveller yells to the other two for help but has to drag the Condemned Man over. The Traveller looks at the face of the Officer's corpse and sees no transfiguration; it “was as it had been in his life” (18). The Officer’s eyes are open, his lips pursed. A large needle had gone right through the middle of the forehead.
Back in the colony, the Soldier points to the tea house. All the buildings in the colony are dilapidated and seem to have “the impression of historical memory” (19). The Soldier explains that the Old Commandant was denied a place in the cemetery by the chaplain and was thus buried here, near a back wall of the tea house not far from where guests sat and drank. The Traveller notes that the people in the tea house are poor and oppressed.
The Soldier pushes aside a table. A gravestone is below, and an inscription identifies it as the Old Commandant’s grave. The stone was put up by his followers, and there is a prophecy inscribed on it that he will rise again and lead his followers to re-conquer the colony. It ends with “Have faith and wait!” (19).
The Traveller stands and looks at the others, all smiling. He gives out some coins and leaves for the harbor.
As he heads to the boat he notices the Condemned Man and Soldier are following him as if they want him to take them with him. He is in the boat by the time they arrive, and even though they could have jumped in, the Traveller picks up a heavy rope and threatens them with it so they cannot.
Analysis
In a truly Kafka-esque twist, the Officer realizes that since he has not convinced the Traveller of the apparatus’s merits, he is doomed. His behavior will now be considered unjust, and he is so committed to his principles that the only course left for him is to use the apparatus himself and inscribe the words “Be Just” on his body. The terrible irony is that the Officer had fooled himself about the efficacy of the apparatus and its ability to manifest transcendence in the condemned. What happens to him is, as the Traveller deems it, simply murder.
As one might imagine, a great deal of the critical literature on this story focuses on the aspects of discipline and punishment and such practices as carried out on the body. Some of the 20th century’s most prominent critics such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Deleuze and Guattari (all of whom fall under the label of post-structuralist theory) focus on how the body is a mechanism or tool through which power is exerted. Here in Kafka’s penal colony there is plenty of evidence to support that claim. The penal colony is a microcosmic power system, but it is also outside of (what we recognize as) the law. The ruling power has constructed this apparatus to impress upon the ruled its power and dominance, and it does that “impressing” in a literal way, in that the Harrow is carving the laws onto the body. In critic Daniela Stoica's terms, the apparatus is both a “Repressive State Apparatus (since it is an instrument of torture, inside a repressive institution—the penal colony) and [an] Ideological State Apparatus (since it inscribes the death sentence directly on the condemned's body and the meaning of this sentence is understood by the condemned in a moment of euphoria or illumination just before his death).” This means that it works both to physically coerce—torturing and killing the body—and to mentally manipulate—making the tortured person think that they are being redeemed. It is a man-made torture device that the ruling power “uses in order to impose its values, its laws, and its order.”
The apparatus also has, Stoica notes, “the characteristics of an object of desire, of a fetish, since it seems to create pleasure both to the crowd witnessing the public executions and the Officer.” That pleasure is sadistic, of course, but rooted in performance and resulting in collective catharsis. Let us turn to the story in context of Foucault’s trenchant analysis of the history of punishment in his work Discipline and Punish. Foucault describes the more archaic form of punishment, which was spectator-based, and in which discipline is enforced through the public witnessing of the effects of breaking the law. The more modern form of punishment based on a "panoptic" model, in which the public internalizes the laws and expectations of the machine of social discourse. Critic Daniel Boyer explains how in the first form such torture marked the victim, turning him into a kind of public sign or language. He quotes Foucault: “[Torture] must mark the victim: it is intended, either by way of the scar it leaves on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy.” The theatrical aspect impressed upon the public the sovereign’s supreme power: something this scary, this horrible, is what the king has the power to do. Kafka’s apparatus clearly conforms to this model, especially in the glory days of the Old Commandant. The Condemned Man will have the law written on his body, which he does not comprehend with his eyes (a symbol of enlightenment) but rather with the pain on his body. And the punishment functions as a glorious ritual to the power of the regime, something for which the Officer is now nostalgic.
When the Officer decides to place himself in the apparatus, though, this is a kind of allegory for the shift to the newer form of punishment in which ritual is less important, but the mind internalizes the wrong committed (the needle going through the Officer’s forehead is symbolic of this). Boyer references Foucault’s account of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison designed so the prisoners are aware that the warden’s eyes could be on them at any moment, though they will never know exactly when. The focus of the new penal system was “to reach the heart and mind of the criminal and provide moral instruction.” But Foucault argued that there was a much more sinister component. He identified it as only egalitarian in principle and “supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines.” The body is now an intermediary between the law and the soul/mind of the criminal. It does not act as a spectacle for an audience but as a way to reach the convict’s soul. Boyer writes that the aim of discipline is now to “[make] the convict ever anxiously aware of a liberty he has lost by committing his crime. For Foucault, this ‘interest’ holds tremendous discursive value because it can be doled out, rescinded, and controlled according to how well the individual assimilates. Assimilation, in this context, means acquiescing to the demands of technology and industrialization. It requires both a literal and symbolic union between man and machine.”
“In the Penal Colony” is compelling because it encompasses both the old order in its focus on torture and the body, and the new order in the focus on semiotics and the soul of the criminal. When the Officer submits himself to the apparatus, it is partly because he has internalized the norms of the society and exercises them on himself—as in the "new order" of the Panopticon. But the punishment is old-school torture, made into a public spectacle.
The Officer’s death symbolizes the death of the Old Order and ascendance of the New. Stoica even suggests that it is a reverse Oedipal ending because for much of the story it seems as if there is a disturbing father-son relationship between the Old Commandant and the Officer (especially evinced in the handing down of the sacred diagrams, not to mention the carrying on of the former’s legacy), but the Old Commandant ends up killing his own "son" via the apparatus.
Clearly, “In the Penal Colony” is a short story that operates on many levels. It may be “about” colonialism or religion or the nature of the penal system; more likely, though, it is about all of them, as well as even more general themes such as the nature of power, man’s inhumanity, the meaninglessness of life, and more.
