Best Answer
In August Wilson’s Fences, the author explores several themes as they relate to the central themes of race, fatherhood, and manhood in the United States. One of the themes that he tackles is the concept of fate, though the approach is less about life being preordained as it is an examination of how history, social circumstances, and upbringing can combine to make some events appear preordained or fated rather than the intervention of some type of divine or supernatural fate. This contextual analysis of manhood in a political situation that seems designed to challenge it was explored by Sophocles in his plays, as well, and he linked the idea of a good man with the idea of a good state. Sophocles’ plays seem to reinforce the idea that a good man cannot exist in a corrupt state.
In many ways, Wilson uses events in the play to symbolize the treatment of African Americans in the United States. For example, when Troy’s father discovers that he has lost a mule because he was flirting with a woman, he viciously beats Troy and then rapes the woman with whom he was flirting. It is impossible not to recognize those actions as examples of the very behaviors that helped define some of the worst aspects of slavery, so that Troy’s father transitions, in that moment, from a symbolic example of black manhood into a symbol is the continuing oppression that developed in slavery. It is a complex perspective that helps the reader understand Troy’s rejection of his father, but also the conflicted feelings he has about that rejection.
Wilson also uses motifs though the play Fences. One motif that Wilson explores is the idea of the absent black father, which shapes Troy and Bono’s decisions about whether or not to parent and how they choose to parent. This motif is one that the audience will understand because it is an oft-repeated idea in American society, even in the fact of evidence that the stereotype is largely unsubstantiated, which the play explores, as well.
