However, his use of tough love and lack of approval towards his children creates conflict in the play, which suggests the importance of a father’s emotional role in a family. The role as a breadwinner: In Troy’s mind, he has done everything right as a father because he has provided his family with basic needs for survival: a place to live, food on the table, and clothes on their backs. His strong work ethic has made him the man he is today; but he often burns all his fuel at work and, at the expense of his family, copes with his pain by drinking.
The title of the play, “Fences" , symbolizes the function of a fence literally, which is to keep people in and out. Troy & Cory are in the same bubble, because they are father and son. This bubble is guarded by a fence. In that bubble, they experience things together, including the conflicts they have about Cory wanting to play football. Cory understands in order for him to be able to move on with his life, he needs to come at peace with the resentment and anger he has towards his father.
Troy chose to escape his reality by having an affair that gives him some laughs and good time every now and then. However, despite the flaws in Troy’s character, he was a providing family man who wants to insure a better life of his sons than the one he had. Based on the play’s time period, which took place at the 50’s, apparently the main problem of Troy Maxson’s character was racism against African Americans at the time that had prevented him from achieving his dreams. Throughout the play, Troy expresses his dissatisfaction in several scenes with the other characters.
Troy’s inability to commit to building his fences despite his repetitive speaking of how he is going to finish his fence shows how his isolation from his wife stems from his inability to truly commit to his wife even though he always told her he loved her. He wanted to protect his wife from the truth that he cheated on her and has a baby on the way with her but the fence prevented true communication with his own wife. Troy's inability to see the change in civil rights during his time period because of the fence led to the isolation of his mindset towards African American rights and the straining of his relationship with his son. His struggle to be accepted into playing professional sports alongside white men lead to preventing his son from playing professional football despite the changing times in civil rights. Without isolation from change, his relationship with his son could possibly be a happy one.
In summary, the play “Fences “setting was set during the 1950’s in Pittsburg, where many African Americans were fighting for their rights. Many of the minority population were getting treated poorly and unfairly. Troy Maxson, his wife and son lived off a small alley in a big-city. The main character Troy was a sanitation worker and former Negro League baseball player.
With this play I believe that the author is trying to explain the importance of forgiveness and loyalty within a family living through struggles at a time of racism and poverty. Troy Maxson is a fifty-three year old man who works at a sanitation department. He refuses to show love and appreciation for others because he believes that his duties and responsibilities are what matters most. Troy’s
It additionallyconveys the emotional barrier that Troy puts between them. Furthermore, Troy ruins his marriageby cheating on his wife, Rose, by having an affair with another woman named Alberta. Howeverunlike Rose, who strives to build a fence around her family, Troy attempts to evade capture in thefence. He doesn't have the capacity to understand that Rose wants to keep the family close becausehe never truly had a close family. As a result, Troy ends up driving everybody away just like hisfather.
Troy displays an even greater desire for dominance over his other son, Cory, because of tension and conflict between the characters. A central conflict in the plot of Fences is that Cory wants to play football professionally but his father will not let him. As Ama Wattley states in Father-Son Conflict and the American Dream, “due to racial discrimination… [Troy] directs his son away from the dream of success and toward the pragmatism of surviving and coping in a racist society” (Wattley 3). Troy’s emotional conflict against himself and society for not participating in major league baseball coupled with Cory’s possible success creates a strain on their
Troy wants to control his family. When the Scene 1 Troy’s elder son Lyon’s has come to borrow some money as a loan, but troy criticizes him badly, but his sons rememorized him that in his childhood, his father is not there to complete his needs in his youth now he is too old. He wants him to get a good job, but Lyon’s think that nothing wrong with his music and he doesn’t want to get any jobs. ‘’ Troy offers Lyon’s sound advice, but Lyon response reminds Troy and witnessing the exchange that, as Lyons said ‘’ You and I are two different people, Pop,’ and that Troy’s prescription about life and work are a ‘’day late and the dollar short’ (119)(Wilson 19).
The play describes the life of Troy Maxson a middle age Africa-American man who was raising his family in time of racism. Troy is married to Rose and the father of three children. Troy has two sons Lyons and Cory, and a daughter named Raynell. August Wilson describes the life of Troy as someone who feels he is being oppressed and how different the culture was when his was a child growing up compared to his children’s lives.
Brother, Gabriel. He shows the father and son complex in the relationship between Troy and Troy’s son, Cory. And finally he shows true friendship in the relationship between Troy and Troy’s best friend, Bono. Wilson masterfully crafts the novel to show many different types of relationships in a short three acts.
He has a softer tone in the dialogue with Rose which shows that he does care about Cory. He is tough on Cory because he doesn’t want his son to experience the same things as he, as a black male in the mid-century, endured. He believes that a sturdy hand will lead his son in the right direction and prepare him for a harsh world. Troy tells Rose, “He’s got to make his own way. I made mine.
Troy is controlling and often verbally abusive to his family members because he lacks a sense of control in other areas of his life, he is unable to achieve his dream of becoming a pro-baseball player or advance in his career and this makes him feel inadequate. Troy’s wife Rose represents a stereotypical mother and dutiful wife role. Rose has two disadvantages in her life because she is not only African American, she is also a woman and in some ways she is the wife you would expect during the 1950s era. Rose however, is not weak minded because she recognizes how times have changed and this what makes Troy and Rose so drastically different throughout the play. Their contrasting ideologies represent two different aspects of the “African American Experience” by showing a major question many African Americans faced during the 1950s and that is: “are times really changing?.”
Troy 's hatred of his father acts as a catalyst for many moments in Troy 's life, in negative and positive ways alike. Unlike most fathers, Troy 's father didn 't leave him with a material possession such as a house but instead left him with emotional baggage that crippled the earlier and later parts of Troy 's life. From the beginning, Troy 's father was abusive to his mother and all of his siblings. Troy and his family worked hard on their father 's farm and endured his bitterness towards being a sharecropper. Troy states that his father was greedy and would put his own personal needs above the needs of the family.
In August Wilson’s playwright Fences, the narrator portrays racism in a social system, in the workplace, and in sports, which ultimately affects Troy’s aspirations. Troy Maxson is constantly facing the racism that is engraved into the rules of racial hierarchy –– fair and unfair, spoken and unspoken. Troy suffers many years of racism when he plays in the Negro major Baseball League; therefore he decides to protect Cory from ever experiencing those blockades in his drive for success. In the end, although Troy is always driving to obtain agency, Troy always succumbs to the rules of racism because those racist ideologies are too hard to overcome. Throughout the play, Troy is perpetually confronting the racist social system that displays unspoken
