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The Prison
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Prison, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Regret
From the beginning of “The Prison,” Tommy describes his life as continually facing “this sick-in-the-stomach feeling of being trapped in old mistakes.” As Tommy reflects on his life up to the present, he alludes to his childhood involved in petty crime. Having grown up in an overcrowded tenement, he dreamed of getting out of his impoverished neighborhood; at the time, the gang of young men who committed crimes but had money enticed him, so he…
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Empathy
Because of his own youthful crimes, Tommy feels a connection to the girl he catches stealing chocolate from his candy store. Rather than react in anger, he compares himself as a young boy to the girl. In addition to his past mistakes, he remembers his Uncle Dom, who intentionally took care of Tommy yet disappeared to prison while Tommy was still young. Tommy finds himself “thinking about the way his life had turned out…
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Powerlessness
The root of Tommy’s distaste for his life in “The Prison” lies in his constant state of powerlessness. His feeling of powerlessness traces back to his childhood in his “tenement-crowded, kid-squawking neighborhood, with its lousy poverty.” He recalls being a child with many dreams, but the environment he grew up in quickly made those dreams impossible due to a lack of resources. He had the opportunity to be a shoemaker, but after he quit…
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