This article explores Corneille's ‘prison monologues’ – soliloquies uttered by imprisoned characters contemplating their own forthcoming execution. Unable to engage materially with the world, Corneille's prisoners are effectively reduced to voices; although objectively powerless, they are subjectively able to wield language as a tool to engage with and symbolically triumph over death. Refusing to condemn the potential fallibility or illegitimacy of the legal power that has condemned them, prisoners like the eponymous tragicomic hero of Clitandre and Clindor in L’Illusion comique devise creative, poetic accounts to justify and explain their imprisonment on a symbolic level, in an attempt to reconcile themselves to – or even to transcend – the degraded reality of their current situation and their upcoming fate. Corneille's prison monologues dramatize the tension between the prisoners’ abstract trust in justice and their physical, embodied experience of imprisonment, thus unearthing a new side to these early Cornelian heroes.

本文探讨了Corneille的“监狱独白”-被监禁的人物考虑自己即将被处决而提出的独白。由于无法与世界进行实质性接触，Corneille的囚徒实际上被贬低了声音。尽管客观上无能为力，但他们在主观上能够运用语言作为与死亡互动并象征性地战胜死亡的工具。拒绝谴责谴责他们的法律权力的潜在谬误或不合法性，囚犯像《幻象》中的克利安德雷和克林多同名悲剧人物一样货币创造力，诗意的叙述，以象征性的意义说明并解释其入狱，以使自己与当前状况和即将到来的命运的退化现实相协调，甚至超越。Corneille的监狱独白戏剧化了囚犯对司法的抽象信任与他们实际的，实际的监禁经验之间的紧张关系，从而为这些早期的Cornelian英雄发掘了新的面貌。