It is impossible to read this text and to not remember about The trial of the same author. It seems to be that both stories were written in the same period of time. However, in this story, the main issue is completely the opposite of the one in The trial. In The Penal Colony Kafka take us to a “world” that could exist anywhere, and to a situation that makes us think about thousands of different things. The issue that I would like to discuss here is about the application of justice and the way that justice is applied.
My favourite quote of the text is this one: “The basic principle I used for my decisions is this: Guilty is always beyond a doubt” (7). Guilty about what? About whatever the condemned were acussed. It is interesting that the officer consider “The apparatus” a court. For him, that is the place where justice is applied. And the defendant is always Guilty. That’s why they don’t use the word “defendant”, they always refer to him ad “the Condemned”, with capital letter. Condemned is his new name. The subject is lost to become just “the Condemned”. Of course, this point takes us to another, the problem of justice. This issue has been discussed for thousands of years in the philosophical tradition of law. Justice, however, is not the same as law. But here, in the penal colony, there is a kind of law under all the stuff related to the “apparatus”. The law is that anybody who is accused of something (it seems to be that only for superiors) becomes guilty. This argument remember me one of the perspectives that appear in Plato’s text, The Republic (My apologize, but I don’t remember the character). There, one character says that justice is what the best for the most powerful is. That line came into my mind when I read the text (even when Plato disagree about that argument). But it seems to be that justice, in this text, is what the powerful says. The stability of “justice”, or what justice is for the officer, start to shake after the arrival of the new Commandant. This character (that actually never appear in the story) is the one that disturbed the officer and his “procedure” of justice. The officer is so upset about the new situation that try in a desperate way to keep thing working as it used to be. Sadly for him, all his efforts bring dead to him.
Other point of the story that I found interesting, is the punishment of the body. After the Condemned is “found” guilty, without a trial, the punishment is not to be in jail for a certain period of time. They inscribed his fault in his body. Is the body the one that will be serving his sentence forever.
Final issue. I thought too about Bakhtin`s idea of dialogue. I like to think a text as a dialogue. I would like to go deep about the quote I used at the beginning and ask the text to whom is talking, and “who” is talking when the officer says what it says.