My Analysis of the Penal Colony
Haruki Murakami first introduced me to Kafka in his bestselling international novel “Kafka on the Shore”. The protagonist’s name is Kafka. One would say that Franz Kafka is Murakami’s biggest influence in all his works. To discover where this genius finds his inspiration, I began reading “the Metamorphosis and Other Stories.” I noticed these two authors share a surreal fiction in their stories. It’s an experience that you have been warped into a new world with strange behaviors. We enter the author’s universe, and if you ever return, you’ll never be the same.
I read the entire short-story collection once in 2012. His work led me to read his novel “Amerika,” but I would return to his short stories when I come across moments in my life that felt “Kafkaesque”. Kafkaesque is a style that takes you away from your comfort zone, shows you a new reality, and transforms you into a new idea. Have you ever had moments when the unexpected happens to just you? Like it’s happening now! It’s never really explained, and we come up with our own judgment like it could have been divine intervention. One can accept it, or reject it. But the moment I opened and read “In The Penal Colony”, I’ve just been abducted from my senses.
When I returned to my senses, I found it hard to describe what exactly happened. I felt like I’ve been stripped of everything I’ve perceived was true. The torture felt real to me. The story opens up with all of the characters gazing at the apparatus. “‘It’s an exceptional apparatus,’ the officer said to the world…” (Kafka, p.95) Everyone’s focus, including the mine, is fixed on the apparatus, or the idea of the apparatus.
First, I want to note how strange it was that the characters entered the story unexplained like they were preset in position for the story. The characters were waiting for us. The book is a portal to the author’s universe. Only our conscience is warped into the Penal Colony. Everything else in our realm of time and space is unchanged. Where were you when you read the Penal Colony? I was on my bed. When I finished, nothing changed in my room, except I felt like I changed.
A key method used in Kafkaesque style of literature is its ability to trick people, and fool our minds. For the dark stories by Kafka, you feel like you’re on a bad psychedelic trip. The way he plays with us in this story is through torture. The apparatus symbolizes torture. Readers can feel a type of mental torture from reading this story, and I think that’s Kafka’s intent on playing with the reader because his style involves breaking the fourth wall.
The apparatus is described to have three parts. “The lower part is called the bed, the upper one is the designer, and this one in the middle here that hovers between them is called the harrow.” (Kafka, p.97) When you read the story, did you think about where you were? You were probably reading on your bed with the book held out in front of you. I think the apparatus is the process of reading the story. Your bed is like the bed of the apparatus. We’re not tied down, but we feel paralyzed by the reading because we’re hooked to this story. The harrow would be the story, or the book. Every single word in this story is embedded in our thoughts. The last part of the apparatus is the designer. A designer is someone who creates something, and Kafka would be the designer of this story.
Reading can be torturous. It requires the reader to understand words – being literate. We feel tortured because we are spending time and energy reading a text that will affect us. “The harrow wasn’t writing at all but just stabbing, and the bed wasn’t rolling the body over but thrusting it up, quivering, into the needles.” (Kafka, p.118) I was there, watching it all happen. When I need to keep reading, I can’t look away from the text. I can only keep reading. It pains me to read the pain of a man, and the process of reading can mentally fatigue you.
Timing is also very important in the reading. Consider how long it took you to finish the story, and think about the how time operates with the torture apparatus. “So it keeps on writing more and more deeply for all twelve hours. For the first six hours the condemned is alive almost as before, he only suffers pain. The felt gag is removed after two hours, as he no longer has the strength to scream.” (Kafka, p.104) It should take readers about two hours to finish this story. That’s two hours of the torture through reading, and even more hours of torture after we finish. It burns your mind until you’ve figured it out. It keeps beating the back of our heads.
When we close the book, we return our world. We leave this Kafkaesque universe, and the only change made was to your subconscious. Tortured since a boy, Kafka has lived an unhealthy life. His only salvation was through story writing where he would create a world to escape reality. In the Penal Colony, he gives us a sensation of torture. In all of his stories, he warps us into a world that’s familiar in sight, but our gut tells you something subtly different. When you return, you’re never the same person you were once before.
Bibliography
Kafka, Franz. “In The Penal Colony.” The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. New York: Barnes & Nobles Classic, 2003. 95-120. Print.
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