Summary
In the first class after the screening, Felix smuggles cigarettes into the prison through bags of chips and distributes them to the players as "compensation" for their work. Their final assignment is to report on the afterlives of their characters in teams. Team Ariel reports that Ariel has now become a weather hologram who continues to control the environment around him. Team Antonio presents an unhappy and tragic ending to The Tempest in which Prospero is murdered by his brother and Miranda is thrown overboard on the way back home. Unhappy that Miranda has gotten "swept up" in these interpretations rather than granted an afterlife, Anne-Marie performs a choreographed routine that is part ballet and part karate, redeeming the character of Miranda as a strong and independent female role.
Team Caliban, or Team Hag-Seed, creates a narrative for Caliban and Prospero in which Prospero is actually Caliban's father. According to the players, Prospero takes Caliban under his wing, cleans him up, and gets him a job as a musician back in Milan where he becomes a very successful star.
Team Hag-Seed has another interpretation of Caliban's afterlife, however, and they ask Felix's permission to perform an excerpt from a musical they have already begun working on. The musical number allows Caliban to have his own voice at the same time he is put in a cage as part of a freak show. Felix is intrigued by the performance and the players ask if he would be willing to direct it. He agrees, seeing it as more of a dream than a reality, but happy to have inspired the men's creativity.
The last "lesson" Felix has to teach the players is about identifying all the prisons in the play. The men identify all but one, and they ask Felix what the last one is. Felix explains that the final prison of The Tempest is the play itself: Prospero asks the audience to "set him free" so he does not have to relive his desire for revenge over and over as the theatre demands.
Analysis
This final section of the novel is a return to the original but more subtle goals of the novel: a fundamental engagement with the forms and themes of literature. While the afterlives imagined by the players vary in their severity, the sheer number of stories told suggests that each man has brought his own creative and interpretive lens to the play. Such engagement is precisely what the Literacy Through Literature program hoped to achieve, and Felix's revenge on Tony and Sal is suddenly a secondary matter when compared to his intervention in the educational methods at Fletcher Correctional.
Felix notes early on that The Tempest is a play about prisons, and that theme continues through the end of the novel as Felix and the inmates negotiate power structures in a number of different ways. Here, Felix remains largely peripheral, this time serving as an audience member, while the players are granted full reign over their interpretations of the play. The novel thus showcases growth not only in Felix individually and the players as a group, but also in the relationship between the two as they reconsider the power dynamics at play between them -- the players as incarcerated men and Felix as a "free" authority figure. Ultimately, Atwood crafts a novel that is also about prisons -- more specifically, it is about the prison system and the power dynamics that exist in society among individuals.
