Il carcere was composed from November to April of the ' 39, with the title Memorie di due stagioni. The author decided to publish it many years later, in the ' 48, with a most mature and complex novel , La casa in collina , under a title, Prima che il gallo canti , that connected both to a crisis of conscience born by the not having taken part to the Resistance.

Il carcere is an ambitious ambiguos novel, hopelessly and narcisistically literary. It tried to be the story of a human not-share, of a not-solidarity with the others. Il carcere had the tendency to objectify in artistic representation the tragedy of the writer of that epoch: his compulsory loneliness, that he tried to transform in a historical choice, to set it to the protagonist, to look it from the than above of the protagonist and to see bravely all the aberrant consequences of it.
The author tried a contradictory operation: of sublimation in the metaphysical symbolism; of not mystification through the representative realism. The failure of this impossible project is given partly also by the language, not yet carrying. A substantially evocative soft language creates dissolved effects, and it reduces the potential dramatic force of the story, that enucleates itself only in the clearest and graven zones, realized in the dialogue.
To the origin of the circumstance narrated there is a moral problem: how to affirm, in the not-liberty the liberty? Electing the inflicted and suffered wanted and choiced loneliness , Stefano, the protagonist, tries the typical stoic liberty of the transformation of the evil in well, of the destiny in virtue, beginning to live a process of progressive volontary extraneousness to that people, to that country, to that sea that are the walls of his invisible jail...
And the spirit of that earth from which Stefano doesn't want to make to seize, is a raw, obscene animal nature, lived secretly behind the fronts of the houses.
In the progressive effort to get estranged, Stefano indulges to two errors: he flirts almost incestuously with a pale, unmade, maternal woman of the country, Elena, and he squeezes a tacit friendship with a young man, Giannino. Seized in these two human relationships, incapable of to truncate them, he decides to live them in loneliness, denying them as relationship, suppressing the humanity of the communication. So a brave struggle begins whose first victim, is naturally the woman. After many merciless hits, he wants to force her " to serve him as body", only as body, without ask her other things. When Elena, molt but proud, she revolts disappearing, Stefano understands that an advancement on the road of the loneliness is the chastity, and by now" the extreme obstacle to the most true loneliness" is Giannino. But Giannino is halted for carnal violence. Then Stefano is felt free, he feels to have touched the bottom of the loneliness. One day he receives a message in which help, company, solidarity are asked him. An anarchist, a new confined has written it. Stefano burns the message. Afterwards the remission arrives. The circumstance is closed on the hasty departure of Stefano.
The book suffers, in conclusion, of two leading deformations, two real overthrows or alibi that are effected insensitively under the eyes of the reader under the beautiful literary dress.
The first deformation is in the want to let coincide the inhuman condition of Pavese-Stefano with the same human condition, desperated attempt of sublimation of the circumstances of his own ego. The second, who loads to the anarchist the complex of guilt of the author-protagonist, declaring of it, yes, the humanity, the simplicity but, at the same time, projecting on him that judgment of affiliation to" another race, of inhuman tempering", underground. There is here a defense of responsibility, that weakens and it makes ambiguous the moral dominion of the theme and the problem.

It was written in the September 1947 and the February 1948, and published in 1949 with Il carcere in the volume Prima che il gallo canti.
On two plans the city and the hill are: the first one in its realistic value, the second with strong value of metaphor. The novel develops the two terms in a meaningful crescendo. The war creates a "backwash between hill and city": the city under the bombs, chilled, been struck dumb; the hill, with its lawns and woods, provisional shelter for as much poor people from the "nighttime start of the alarms". For Corrado, solitary and introverted Turinese teacher there is a stable house in the hill, warm bourgeois shelter. The war shakes the city on which the historical time engraves with upsetting violence, while the hill is begins it is characterized by an imperturbable immobility, and it lets to discover to Corrado who wanders in loneliness the roots , the dens, the gorges," the hidden lives... the hidden one of the earth."
The thread of the circumstance begins to unravel: Corrado on the hill, among the other dispersed, he finds again Cate, his maltreated love of some years before, who now has a child, Dino, of such age that could be also born by their relationship. Corrado, closed in his "strange immunity in the middle of the things", he mets daily with Cate, he plays with Dino, he fears more and more that he can be his child, but he doesn't dare to arrive to the truth. His ideal, declares to Cate, it would be not to move from the country and he still defends his own loneliness in front of Cate and his Turinese workers friends who begin to get organized covertly. People invoke peace.The 8th September it arrives. For Corrado the loneliness is revealed more and more as a alibi: from illusion of courage he starts to change in conscience of cowardice.
Now Corrado fears the winter and he grabs the secret to the implacable exist of the reality; we cannot hide anymore that his loneliness is an immaturity since around him people begin to pay the true courage with the jail. His alibi (the loneliness as a courage and a challenge) doesn't hold anymore. Then he has a mystical crisis. The " peace ", from this moment, it begins to mean for him not only historical peace, the end of the war, but on the contrary the peace of the soul, the religious peace. At the beginning of the spring, Cate is halted with her partisan friends - and Corrado, nauseated by the terror, he assists to the scene hidden behind the trunks. Uneasy he goes with his foots, from hill to the hill, toward the Langhe where he was born, in a return of lack, full of uncertainties, crossing, neutral and petrified, between republicans and partisans, the hills become a scenery of death, and observing the deaths of the one and the others with the same horror and neutral pity, as if his look was placed above, partecipating of a superior wisdom. On the hill where he was born he finds again a provisional peace. The novel is closed with a famous page of cruel self-denunciation and on a reflection aroused by the "unknown deads, the deads republicans" " They have waked me, if an unknown, an enemy, becomes a similar thing dying... it wants to say that also the enemy is won he is someone, that is necessary to placate him after having scatters his blood, to give a voice to this blood, to justify who has scattered him."
On a first level, the most evident on which has been always interpreted, the novel is an examination of conscience, a confession moved to pity, a shiny and terrible autobiographic transfiguration. He develops, as a street crucis, the itinerary of a conscience that is looked and it is found again guilty, with a radicalism, a strength to be detached from the love for oneself, that beat theirselves of a lot of lengths the ambiguous, defensive narrator of Il carcere. On this plan, La casa in collina is really" the story of a long illusion". But above all, on another plan, in the novel a clash and a problematic comparison between the cities is drawn (or world of the historical happening, of the brutality of the events moved by the human wish, and of the " savage " that is in the city and civilization and history) and the hill, theater of the natural savage (blood in the woods, absorbed blood that blooms again in nature, underground and perennial explosion of the natural strengths in an imperturbable cycle in which the being of the things returns). it is realized so, between the realistic pole of the or historical or savage citizen and that metaphoric of the natural savage, a second vast and ambiguous sense of the novel. A put in relationship is had here in the metaphysical time of the being and the historical time of the events (of which the war becomes the biggest metaphor).