The prison fiction genre is not often the type of literature most students prefer. Perhaps because of the era in which they were written, students have difficulty relating to characters who lived in a setting more than two or three hundred years ago. Although the genre receives attention in many undergraduate American literature courses, high school English teachers rarely, if at all, teach prison narratives. When used, students perceive the captivity narrative as a historical document rather than a literary text. In other words, students do not recognize prison narratives as literature. However, prison fiction deserves a place in high school English classrooms because, as a genre, prison narratives provide the foundation for many of the rhetorical arguments found in U.S. literature. In this way, captivity narratives influenced other literary genres and arguably became the first type of literature to incorporate the American frontier hero while simultaneously subverting traditional gender and racial norms. To encourage greater use of this subject at the high school level, we must teach the prison narrative in the same light that its original readers interpreted it. By treating prison fiction as a form of popular fiction and using Mary Rowlandson's fiction as a specific example, students will discover the literary merit and entertainment value of the prison fiction genre. Therefore, having a class project in which students compare prison narratives to literature they are familiar with and enjoy reading would immediately make prison fiction relevant and therefore worth learning. .... half of the sheet ...... middle school students will choose the texts with which to deal with the story of imprisonment. First, in his novel Catch-22, Heller argues that the bureaucratic world of wartime military life is a desert of reason. As he is drafted, the "evil" US Army forces Yossarian into the wilderness of war and the domain of Catch-22, and the Army takes Yossarian from his innocent state of life, away from the war and into a world that makes sense. Yossarian spends his time trying to leave the military, residing in a liminal space where he cannot follow through on his commitment to perform the required number of dangerous missions without his boss increasing that amount and cannot reasonably live in the military without dying. Yossarian grows morally by learning to circumvent the law of Catch-22: his redemption comes when Yossarian finally abandons logic and sets sail for Sweden on a lifeboat..