The Jacket

The Jacket is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915 (published in the United States as The Star Rover). It is a story of reincarnation.

A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called 'the jacket,' a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.