Care of the (Incarcerated) Self: Ethics and Parrhēsia in the Prison Writing of Jack Henry Abbott

“This article attempts to recover and highlight the rhetorical and ethical significance of Jack Henry Abbott’s recurrently maligned major literary publication, In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison , a book of writing that developed through the inmate’s correspondence with famed American author Norman Mailer. I argue that Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast demonstrates a model of Foucauldian parrhēsia , a speech act that involves the subject’s articulation of truth in relation to selfhood, an enunciation that simultaneously posits an ethical engagement with the sovereign. Directly revisiting In the Belly of the Beast , I propose that a profoundly different understanding of truth and subjectivity is necessary for thinking about the rhetorical and ethical work of prison writing.”