Franz Kafka's “In the Penal Colony”: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation

“In the Penal Colony” contains all the familiar symbolic action of a nightmare and Kafka's artistic solution of his lifelong intrapsychic conflict. The offending soldier is the instinctual self within the psyche, the Executing Officer is the duplicate of the former Commandant or primary superego, and the Explorer is the conscious ego of the artist. The torture machine is the mechanical equivalent of the devouring mother created by the oral sadism of the culprit. The new Commandant and the ladies are the symbolic representatives of mature experience challenging the residual infantilism in the personality of the artist-hero. The inner conflict is resolved within the nightmare by a sudden but well motivated reversal in which the superego instead of the culprit is destroyed on the torture machine of which he has been so proud and to which he has devoted his whole life. The Explorer's visit to the teahouse at the close of the main action shows all the fantasy components of the infantile personality, and it is their activation during the regression of sleep which has caused the nightmare. The key idea is found in the fact that the priest of the penal colony had denied burial in consecrated soil to the body of the former Commandant.

As the action opens, a private soldier has been found sleeping outside of his superior officer's door at two o'clock in the morning. It was the duty of this private soldier or instinctual self to salute the door of the superior officer at the stroke of each hour during the night. On this night, instead of accepting the whipping for failure to perform his duty, the private soldier threatened to eat his superior alive