In the Penitentiary Colony, written at the dawn of the First World War, is one of Kafka's most shocking stories. Thematically close to The Trial and The Condemnation, it tells the story of an explorer who upon arriving at an exotic island discovers a prison colony in which no court operates, but rather a sophisticated torture machine that passes sentence and executes the convicts in question. of hours. With very few scenic elements and a cold and distanced language, the author creates a disturbingly modern story that, as Luis Fernando Moreno Claros points out in the epilogue, "can easily be interpreted as a metaphor for the horrors of today's world: unfair to the weak, ruthless, cynical, dominated by technological artifacts and by amoral technocrats who worship them, and immersed in deadly and endless wars.