Prisons, institutions that practice supposedly more “civilized” forms of punishment compared to pre-modern public executions, exhibit all the characteristic features of “total institutions,” as Irving Goffman describes in his seminal book Asylums (1961), which make use of mortifying processes that deprive inmates of their self-consciousness and degrade them. Similarly, Michel Foucault’s insightful concept of ‘discipline’ in prisons,” which he outlines in Discipline and Punish (1975), shows how the tightly organized daily lives of inmates and the prison surveillance system manipulate them to produce compliant subjects. Literature, however, owes much to the creative writings produced by the prisoners who either wrote about the very experience of their detainment or turned the harsh realities of prison into an opportunity to write as a gesture of resistance in the face of the devastatingly manipulative daily routine of prison life.

A Goffmanian-Foucauldian is thus adopted to read The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972) and show how the book’s account of prison living conditions meticulously brings to the fore the omnipresence of the disciplinary apparatus, surveillance and control techniques which will secure the smooth running of the prison life at the cost of physical and psychological sanity of the inmates. Furthermore, it will be illustrated how the act of writing can stand as a sign of resistance and self-expression against the mortifying machinery of prison.