Upon finishing August Wilson’s Fences I saw it primarily as a play about a very selfish man thwarting the dreams and desires of those around him. However, most of Troy’s actions are motivated by his own illusions that manifest themselves as selfishness. His dramatic tale that he feels exemplifies his life is his story of wrestling with death and the devil when in reality he had survived a severe episode of pneumonia. His interpretations of death and the devil are both obstacles to his achieving his own dreams. He says that his abusive father was “the devil himself”. Since he had to migrate north and live on the streets, his father was largely responsible for crushing his dreams. Troy’s description of the devil as a figure with a sickle in a white, hooded robe is similar to a KKK member in full regalia. The grip reaper-esq character he describes personifies racist discrimination, which is a force that he sees as ever-present and unconquerable, much like death itself.
Troy seems extremely hypocritical when he does not allow his son Cory to play football because he does not want him to suffer from discrimination while trying to become the first African-American garbage truck driver himself. Troy sees this behavior as fighting that hooded figure of death and discrimination. He becomes a garbage truck driver to fend it off while keeping Cory out of football to protect him from it. In the end, however, he crushes Cory’s dreams of becoming a professional athlete much like his own father (the devil) did. His death is also symbolic of his fight with the devil because he has a sudden cardiac arrest while holding a baseball bat in preparation to swing, as though he were challenging death.
Troy’s brother, Gabriel, acts as a foil to Troy’s illusions of death and the devil. Though Gabriel does not have all of his mental faculties intact, he is loving and forgiving in spite of the way he is treated and perceived. At the end when Gabriel attempts to blow his trumpet to open the gates of Heaven, he is trying to give Troy ultimate forgiveness as though to show that he has not succumbed to the devil. Through the cryptic dance and ambiguous ending, I think August Wilson wanted the reader to decide whether or not Troy overcame his illusions by making it into Heaven of if he surrendered to them. (402)
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3 comments:
Mac--a good and thoughtful post. Both in how Troy ends up becoming (or at least doing) everything he was at one time trying to escape, and in how Gabe's gentle, innocent spirit is the opposite of Troy's fierce, combative soul.
Wow, you are really good at writing accurate and thoughtful posts. What you say about Troy, I think, is totally correct. Great blog!
i love the way you bring together the fact that troy has a history with "the devil" and the history of the times with the klan... it is interesting to look at the play in that light and i completely understand where you are coming from! nice job!
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