This study is based on Foucault`s theory, especially as revealed in his book Discipline and Punish, in order to see the prison as a metaphor and as an essential condition of Dublin society in Joyce`s Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Foucault explains that an insidious form of social surveillance and a process of normalization is pervasive. This, according to Foucault, is encapsulated by Bentham`s Panopticon, a nineteenth century prison system in which the supervisor could watch inmates from the central tower, yet the inmates could never be certain when they were being watched; therefore, over time, the inmates began to police their own behavior. Joyce was not interested in prisons themselves, but metaphorical prisons are everywhere in his texts. Most of Dubliners feel imprisoned in a paralyzing prison from which they cannot escape. They feel as if they were "prisoner[s] for life." A domestic nest, for example, turns out to be a prison for Little Chandler, Eveline ("Eveline"), Bob Doran ("The Boarding House") and Farrington ("Counterparts"). Maria in "Clay" is virtually incarcerated and must ask permission even to spend an evening out. Mr Duffy in "A Painful Case" has internalized an inspecting gaze to the point that he is his own overseer. Gretta in "The Dead" refuses to become merely the "docile body" of a patriarch not by submitting to his desire. Stephen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also imprisoned in the labyrinth of Ireland/island like Daedalus and Icarus of Greek myth. His Jesuit school in particular is represented as a very oppressive institution in which the students are constantly watched. Classification is also used as a means of subjection. Father Arnall, for example, separates the class into Houses of York and Houses of Lancaster and makes them compete with each other. Further, the minute division of time subjects the students to the schedule of the school. Like surveillance and along with it, normalization becomes one of the great instruments of power. Stephen is under a constant normalizing gaze and is threatened into submitting to and obeying it. Declining this normalizing pressure, Stephen, "a heretic," determines to flee from this Panopticon society.