Prisons Symbol Analysis

Prisons, both mental and physical, dominate the novel. After getting fired from his job, Felix exiles himself to a primitive cottage and allows himself no contact with his former life; he becomes so obsessed with his grief for his daughter Miranda and desire for revenge on Tony that he’s unable to form new relationships with others. In this sense, he keeps himself in an emotional prison for most of the novel. Ironically, it’s by going to work in a real concrete prison that he’s able to liberate himself by finding new purpose. When he tells the ghost of his daughter to “be free” at the end of the novel, Felix uses the rhetoric of imprisonment and release to express that freedom is a matter of personal choice.

For the inmates at Fletcher Correctional Center, however, imprisonment has nothing to do with personal choice. On the contrary, most of them see prison as the manifestation of the social oppression which has characterized their lives and the history of their country. This is particularly evident through their strong identification with Caliban, a “monster” in The Tempest who is imprisoned and enslaved for most of the play; rewriting Caliban’s story and imagining a triumphant life for him after the play, they reframe his imprisonment as a result of the social conditions under which he lives, rather than his innate character or morals. Moments like this argue that while people create some prisons for themselves, others are enforced by society in order to demonize and disadvantage its most vulnerable members.