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prisoner’s effects are confiscated by anonymous “jailer’s hands— fat, hairy, soiled, accustomed to handling these cast-off objects. From now on, they are only Number 30’s ‘bundle.’” But who is ‘Number 30’? The gritty details (“fat, hairy, soiled,”) embed the reader in the physicality of the situation and satisfy her legitimate expectations for novelistic atmosphere, without inviting identification with the elusive narrator. These modernist stylistic devices, no doubt deliberate, reflect Serge’s literary project:
    Individual existences—beginning with my own—are only of interest to me in relation to the vast collective life of which we are only parcels, more or less endowed with consciousness. Thus the form of the classic novel seemed impoverished and dated. The banal French novel in particular, with its dramas of love and ambition, centered at most around a family, seemed to me a model not to follow in any case. My first novel had no central character. It is not about me or about a few, but about men and about prison. 31
    Serge handles the problem of presenting general truths while satisfying our novelistic expectations by alternating ironic first-person meditations on topics like “Capital Punishment,” “The Guards,” and “Architecture,” with author omniscient chapters filled with character, dramatic and stream of consciousness. For example, in one such scene, Serge enters the mind of a prisoner named Moure, interiorizing his crude and strangely poetic homoerotic obsessions, rather daring for 1929. As
New Statesman
book critic Stanley Reynolds remarked, “Here, too, I think, must be the original spring of Jean Genet. Consider thehomosexual Moure, alone in his cell, dreaming of boy friends called Georgette, Lucienne and Antionette. Moure links the most brutally obscene, obscene to the point of cruelty, with love words and coquettish diminutives.” 32
    In 2013, political prisoner David Gilbert had another response to this passage: “I don’t think I can see the passage on Moure (who is also a sex offender and had sex with ‘corrupted adolescent[s]’) as affirming gay desire. The ‘unctuous’ Moure is introduced as the one who snitched on Duclos, a man of ‘integrity,’ who loved reading and did favors in violation of the rules, and got him sent to the hole. Then Moor got his job. Maybe I’m too much of a hardened con, but I can’t see a snitch as a positive figure.” Gilbert concludes that Serge, although a man of universal sympathies, was to an extent a captive of the homophobic prejudices of his times.
    Serge’s strategy of alternating such narrative scenes with extended generalizing meditations, also serves to slow down the pacing of his novel. This alternation gives the reader the impression of the slow passage of time—time being of the essence in a story about ‘doing time’ in a place where essentially nothing is allowed to happen to mark time’s progress. After each intellectual flight, we land right back in the daily brutalizing regime of prison, where time has stood still—perhaps for a day, perhaps for a year.
    When embedded more directly in the narrative, Serge’s ironic and generalizing ‘digressions’ provoke a proto-Brechtian ‘distancing’ or alienation effect. For example as the narrator is being led up a stone spiral staircase to be fingerprinted, he suddenly realizes that he is inside the tower of Paris’s medieval Conciergerie and ironically remarks, “They used to question suspects on the rack in the cellars of this very tower. Today they apply Bertillon’s scientific fingerprinting upstairs. This is the stairway of progress.” Much of Foucault could be deduced from a thorough unpacking of this ironic definition of progress.
    Although Serge’s narrator tells us nothing about his history, personal life and relations outside the prison, he does allow us into his spiritual world. He recounts the struggle to maintain his spirit, symbolized by