By using the most reliable institution we have for deciding veracity and fairness as his platform, Kafka highlights our inability to cobble together a solid moral system for enacting equity. His "thematic obsession with questions of law and justice" is not necessarily a consequence of being a law man himself but of the human propensity to transform morality into insanity, such that the law "is the Kafkaesque," the penal colony is the world, and we are all its prisoners.
On the surface, In the Penal Colony is a document of dissent against legal practices that facilitate torture and execution, but its "legal considerations serve a variety of narrative functions" that surpass the ethics of law as an institution. Any bureaucrat worth their salt knows (as Kafka did) that institutions in themselves are nothing more than conveyances for man-made rules; from the outside, institutions symbolize authority as absolute, efficient, and impenetrable, while practitioners on the inside often understand institutional power as fallible and mind-numbingly mundane. By tapping into the underwhelming characteristics of bureaucracy, Kafka excels at depicting the ad hoc nature of power as nightmarish and illogical, hyperbolizing its inscrutability and, perhaps most importantly, underscoring the ironic tensions between our inflated expectations of justice and the banality of authority figures who "are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once."
The Kafkaesque is the "fixed grounding of a moral and ethical position in relation to the horror of the world" that exposes the folly of our worst inclinations, allegorized within the familiar paradigm of the law. But In the Penal Colony also explicitly addresses the carrying out of law and punishment, specifically the "violent and unlawful force" exerted by individuals who are entrusted with administering justice sincerely and objectively. This is why it is impossible to disentangle reality and metaphor in Kafka: writing on both levels simultaneously, he provides a diffusion of meaning in which "each sentence is literal and each signified. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart and out of the abyss between them binds the glaring ray of fascination." From this vantage point, the legal narrative is at once a method of interpreting the treatment of criminals and criminality while also speaking more generally about society's most vulnerable and marginalized members, and its parody of legal arbitration becomes an overarching warning against placing too much trust in anyone who has more power than you do. Most striking, though, is the binary of faith and reason, and man's inability to function admirably in either. The officer who commands the penal colony is stubbornly obedient to the archaic and brutal execution laws he reveres, while the explorer who witnesses the officer's punitive 'justice' with a torturous machine disapproves of such violence in the abstract but does virtually nothing to correct it.
As an innovation of human drama, In the Penal Colony is shocking, absurd, and stirring, and truth - if and when it does exist - is unsavoury. The story is a testament to Kafka's own apprehensions about authority and certainty, which reside for him in the "ambiguity and obscurity... [of] human beings and the conditions in which they live." In these visions of the Kafkaesque "we would rather doubt our reasoned conception of the waking world than the phantasmal images" of Kafka's literal/parallel reality. Such is the prophetic power of his literary hatchet.
