A normal liberal life is one where one can do whatever they want and whenever they want as long as it doesn’t get extreme as much as killing a soul and even then, it can continue as a liberal life if not caught and given responsibility to handle the consequences of such actions. Life behind bars and fences gives a better visual representation of what goes on in a purposeless hopeless mindset.

As I am reading Man’s Search For Meaning, by Victor E. Frankl I stumbled upon concentration camp prisoners stages of mentality. As Frankl explains the second stage of where the prisoner becomes emotionally detached in order to survive he discusses that the most depressing is not knowing the date of release. The prisoner then is put in a state of, “provisional existence of unknown limit.” This in part explains as to the loss sense of time for prisoners in the concentration camps back then and there. Time begins to have an insignificant sense where a routine means nothing.

Albert Camus explains towards the end of his book, L’etranger (The Stranger) that when the main character was forced behind the walls, he came to the realization as to why prisons exists. A normal person who lived a normal life was prohibited to continue such lifestyle started to understand how he was taking everything in his advantage. An important conversation that goes on between him and the cop outside his cell that walks him through the small steps to comprehension as to what he is going to be limited to and what he will miss.

Main character in The Stranger had a detached mentality from the beginning, for some reason he would not experience life the same way a normal person would. The present world felt distant and weird, but once he got behind bars he started mentally understanding what is wrong with him. Even before encountering those multiple significant life events and after he stayed the same, unaffected. Apathetic, emotional numb, and mental detachment, are so often mentioned in both books and even more other concentration camps and imprisonments books that are based on real life stories.

Hopelessness is a symptom out of plenty other symptoms that depression has. Prison life explains in a parallel way what a depressed person feels on a normal basis, except that a depressed person has invisible fence that is hard for others to understand if not felt it in first-person point of view.