Marking the body as a form of appropriation and power in Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee and “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka
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document in English
literature
school essay
published 30/08/2007
review : Completed
level : Advanced
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SummaryIn Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee as well as “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka, the marking of or writing on the body as a form of power or appropriation takes place on many levels. In both works, we have the inhumanly cruel military officials of the colonialist power - Kafka’s Officer is completely deranged - who carry out acts of torture on members of the local population to subjugate them into debilitated passivity, or kill them in order to instill fear into the colonized population and demonstrate their strength and technological prowess.
Table of Contents
- If we look at the first two levels, we can see that torture is very much in the interest of the colonialist, but morally, does not look so good
- While Colonel Joll explains inflicting violence on people whose culpability has not been proven by the noble quest for the truth, the Officer in Kafka's story calls the machine which performs a gruesome routine on condemned men an instrument of justice.
- The machine in the story 'In the Penal Colony' is in a larger sense representative of a colonial power that arbitrarily punishes locals and sends them through trials and tribulations to assume sovereignty over them
- On a more personal level, the Magistrate tries to appropriate the young barbarian girl that he takes in by physically marking her and aspiring to sexually possess her
- Another young girl he is in contact with in the novel is the prostitute from the hotel, whom he compares to a bird
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