In the Penal Colony
An explorer is invited to watch an execution in a tropical penal settlement, and the officer in charge demonstrates the apparatus with the pride of a man defending an inheritance: a harrow that writes the broken commandment into the prisoner's body over twelve hours. The condemned man has not been told his sentence and does not speak the officer's language, because the machine is held to teach him what he did. Kafka wrote it in October 1914 while stalled on the novel that became The Trial, and read it aloud in Munich two years later to an audience that reportedly fainted.
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