The Star Rover: A Tale of Past Lives

The Star Rover is a novel by American writer Jack London published in 1915. In the United Kingdom it was published under the title, The Jacket. 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 straight-jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body. 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. The accounts of these past lives form the body of the work. They are in effect a series of powerfully written, but disconnected and unresolved, short stories.