Franz Kafka's 'In The Penal Colony' - getting the message. One small thing. In The Penal Colony contains a little thread of Kafka's interest in 'getting the message'. In The Penal Colony contains a progression in how Man 'gets the message', any message, and this progression is rounded off with a couple of codas.
The Condemned Man, in his untortured state at least, 'gets' fewer messages than even the lowly Soldier who is guarding him; he seems to be a sort of happy fool who has blundered into this predicament through incompetence. His theme seems to be to stare at things about which he has not the slightest understanding; he is not getting the message.
The Soldier, who can grasp more than his prisoner, understands far more of what is going on in this small deep sandy valley, yet he does not have a foreign language, French, within his head and so he fails to 'get the message', the all important message, that is emanating from the talk between the Officer and the Explorer.
These last two, the Officer and the Explorer, seem to be at the pinnacle of the human ability to 'understand'. Of course then Kafka throws in one of his imaginative ideas. What if even they can't 'get' some ultimate message, a message that is only graspable following hours of physical pain? Irritatingly obscure (to people of my type) this 'final message' can be interpreted in several ways, from 'a form of religious grace' all the way down to 'a grasp of being guilty just by being a human who takes what other humans want'.
When 'getting the message', the difference between the physical and the spoken seems to be important and Kafka writes at least a couple of codas on the theme. The Officer certainly details the working of the machine to this Explorer in words, delivers the message in words; but he fails to convince the man. The Condemned Man is far too curious about the machine-of-execution, he climbs over it and gets in the way. The physical, but not the kind of physical that works. The Officer does not use verbal communication, he throws a clump of earth at his Soldier who wakes up and violently jerks the long chain to yank the Condemned Man away from where he should not be - both the Soldier and the Condemned Man 'get the message' through pain. Perhaps, in this penal-colony world, it is only through pain that people get the message. Later, the Explorer abruptly leaving this penal colony which has become unpleasant to him, decides to take up a heavy knotted rope and brandish it to prevent the Soldier and the Condemned Man from jumping in his boat and following him. This is merely the threat of the pain.
It is perhaps interesting that the two, fast approaching this boat, make a point of not 'voicing' their message while running for it (though there could be practical reasons why): 'They probably wanted to force the Explorer at the last minute to take them with him. While the Explorer was haggling at the bottom of the stairs with a sailor about his passage out to the steamer, the two men were racing down the steps in silence for they did not dare cry out.'
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