Penal Colony Uses Four Characters,

¶ … Penal Colony uses four characters, including the "Traveller," to establish the plot and the tone of the story. There is a definite purpose to using only four characters and there is a powerful use of imagery in the stark descriptions of the setting (landscape). The author uses these stark images to establish the tone, the mood -- as if the brutal killing machine and the reasons why men are put to death in a penal colony aren't enough to establish sufficient darkness and pathos.

The landscape at the very beginning of the story relates a kind of imprisonment by natural world features. The author writes, "…Here in the small, deep, sandy valley, closed in on all sides by barren slopes," to bring the reader into the bleakness of this scene of impending death. The reader already knows that there is a prison here, but bringing the grim stark landscape features into the scene adds dramatic emphasis. No shade was available and "The sun was excessively strong, trapped in the shadowless valley…" the author writes. When the sun is "trapped" that adds to the reader's sense that this is a very confining, uncomfortable place.

The Officer's attempt to wash hands in a bucket -- after earlier having cleaned off oil and grease in the same bucket -- offers a sense of futility and a picture of absurdity to the scene, which is already very bizarre and coldly inhumane.

When the Officer explains to the Traveller that he (Officer) has been appointed judge, it strikes a reader that this is a metaphor for how the Europeans colonized what was later to become Australia (Tasmania in this story). If aborigines happened to be in the way (or occupying) land that the European colonizers wished to claim, the colonizers then became the self appointed judges of what should transpire. There are records of Europeans whipping aboriginal peoples, though not all Europeans were cruel, the condemned man in this story had been horsewhipped in the face, bringing back Tasmanian history vis-a-vis the aborigines who were mistreated (and had Europeans as judge and jury to determine their fate). As to the fate of the aboriginal peoples in Tasmania (possibly the "Condemned man" was a metaphor for aborigines), they were not all killed immediately; many died of diseases brought by the Europeans for which the aborigines had not resistance. This slow death is alluded to in the story: "You see, it's not supposed to kill right away," the Officer said. "The injustice of the process and the inhumanity of the execution were beyond doubt" the author writes, and indeed the inhumanity of colonizing and killing native peoples is obvious given historical context.

The entire scene that unfolds before the consciousness of the reader is cruel, twisted, bizarre and unconscionable. And the author uses the mechanics of this awful machine as part of the barren harsh landscape to build a case for inhumanity and offer the unbelievably torturous situation for condemned men who had done nothing seriously against the order of the day.