When we are confronted with the word jail, we generally envision cold, hard concrete and steel bars; slits for windows that let in as little sunlight as possible and dangerous, fear-provoking criminals. These confinements are thought of places where the filth, scum and law-breaking degenerates of the world are kept. Surely, middle-class and upper class upstanding, law abiding citizens would never be categorized as prisoners.
             In Edward Albee's, The Zoo Story, there appears the phrase, "...where ever better in this humiliating excuse for a jail..."(p.35). Albee asks us to think of the term jail in a different but similar context. Imagine if you would, a zoo. Animals roaming around in man-made settings that replicate their natural habitat and interacting with other creatures; however, what keeps the animals from attacking the people and/or running away from the zoo never to be seen again-bars! Like the animals of the zoo people live and hide behind bars. In essence, the world as a whole can be viewed metaphorically as a jail.
             This 'jail' we as humans live in is often of our own creation; a prison, of sorts, that our minds conjure to protect us from emotional distress. Within the story it becomes blatantly obvious that Jerry's world is his jail. Jerry says, "I live in a four-story brownstone rooming-house on the upper West Side... I live on the top floor; rear; west... It's a laughably small room, and one of my walls is made of beaverboard..."(p.22). He then goes on to describe the inhabitants of the floor, which he lives on. "...a colored queen which always keeps his door open... when he is plucking his eyebrows..."(p.22). Later in the story he tells peter, "I think the rooms are better as you go down, floor by floor"(p.27). I think he is putting himself as being worse off than anyone else in the building by saying that it o
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