Characterism In The African Novelist Ben Okri's Novels

At many places Yeats tries to blend the natural with the supernatural to achieve some desired goals. Edward Said refers to the same fact when he says that Yeats used Irish ‘backwardness as a source for radically disturbing, disruptive return to spiritual ideals lost in an overdeveloped modern Europe’(Cult.and Imp. 274).As a freedom-loving human being, he felt disgusted with the social reality of his time. Injustice and exploitation at the hands of foreign colonial power presented a heart-rending scenario to his inner-self. As a politician he was well-aware about helplessness of his fellow Irish men. However, through his poetic potentialities he tried to raise the banner of resistance through various means. The world of fairies for him was not only limited to mythical interpretation,rather, he used it symbolically to highlight the picture of independent

After all Irish folklore and fairy tales preserved the essence called Irishness. The African Novelist Ben Okri refersto the same opinion when he says, “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories,individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations” (D.Jefferessp.3). Yeats was thoroughly acquainted with the importance of using native literature and folklore to achieve political ends. It was after deep contemplation which made him to convince himself that he should never go for the scenery of a poem to any country but hisown, and he had thought that he should hold on to that conviction to the end’ (N.Jeffares 12). In ‘The Stolen Child’ there is an interaction between the physical and the metaphysical world. The stolen child is symbolic representation of all those human beings who had been victims of injustice and oppression. It was only in the fairy world that panacea was available for their grief and sorrow. It is in the fairy world that joy and happiness is assured to its