Fences Rhetorical Devices

In 1985 American playwright August Wilson wrote and produced a play by the name of Fences which was later adapted into a movie in 2016. The play is about the Maxon family living in 1950s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania struggling to make ends meet. It explores the aspects of family and what makes a father a good father to his family. The author of this play uses multiple formal elements throughout the play such as language, structure, and style to tell an emotionally impactful story about the struggles of a family trying to overcome the racial barriers of society and their struggle to come together.

One formal element Wilson uses to contribute to the play’s aesthetic and emotional impact is the use of flashbacks and motifs. In the play Wilson uses

By the time he was old enough to have an opportunity to join the league he was too old to be a team member. The use of flashbacks of Troy’s time playing baseball helps the audience and readers understand why Troy acts the way he does towards his son and why he uses the motif of baseball so much in his conversations with his own family. Troy frowns upon and sabotages his son’s dream of wanting to play college football not because he does not believe in his son’s ability to play good at football, it is because he thinks that Cory will not be recruited into professional football because of his race just like how he was never allowed to join pro Baseball because of the color of his skin. Troy’s past experience with racism and segregation in baseball deeply impacted him mentally and he copes with the fact that his past dreams were crushed and can never be realized by comparing baseball to his everyday life in his conversations as if he was still playing the game. Flashbacks also help shed light on why Troy parents the way he does. In Act One, scene four of the play Bono and Troy have a chat in Troy’s backyard about their childhood and their relationship with their fathers. The author uses the conversation between Troy and Bono as a way to flashback to Troy's troubled childhood and reveal more about why Troy acts the way he does. Troy’s childhood was plagued with

The way Wilson utilizes the language of the characters and their dialect enhances the experience overall and contributes greatly to the emotional depth and complexity of the play. In terms of dialect, the characters speak in a dialect different from the dialect of people of modern day. When writing the dialogue for the characters in his play the author August Wilson had the characters speak in a dialect typically spoken by African Americans in 1950s Pittsburgh. The author gave the characters that specific dialect because it was the dialect he had commonly heard spoken by people he was surrounded by in his youth. Wilson once said that he began his plays by a writing “line of dialogue to get the characters talking.” “The more they talk, the more I find out about them”, he noted. Wilson wants the characters to be portrayed as authentically to the time period they are portrayed in as possible and the author shows that by having them speak in the dialect. Dialect is not the only use of language used to show the complexity of the play, it is also used to contribute to the emotional depth of the