The drama of Wole Soyinka is the creative mixing of Yoruba rituals, dramatic techniques, music and dance with the foreign language, English. The rites, rituals, gestures, music and dance are some of the nonverbal techniques Soyinka employs in order to achieve his dramatic effect. The language is full of wit and graphic insult. Language is not the only thing Soyinka relies on for effective theatre but also on so many techniques. This is an attempt to discuss these techniques in some important plays of Wole Soyinka.
The Road is Soyinka’s writing on the nation’s wall. He draws a society that is on the road to death and dissolution, a society for which there seems no hope. Perhaps, like Professor, who speaks of death as the moment of our rehabilitation, this society will have to die before it learns the truth. (Roscoe, p. 281). The Road is Soyinka’s most mature work. He displays in this play his usual ability to create living characters, which unlike the rest are more diverse and more deeply explored. In this play songs present life’s progress towards death that reduces everything into nothing. It is a skillfully handled play with fine use of songs. The very first song reveals the quest of man for the essence of death, which alone will explain the meaning of life. It also brings out the truth that loss of belief and conviction has produced a society in a state of transition.
The Road begins and ends on several occasion is punctuated by the rhythmic presence of masque for the dead. The driver’s dirge is sung on the occasion of death, provide a thematic chorus. It comments on the central idea of death and disobedience towards God. All these songs are sung in Yoruba, which underlines their traditional value and customary strength and the...
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...pecially the politicians of the time is vividly shown in his plays. His restless strive for the universal human rights always praised by his audience.
Works Cited
Gibbs, James. Wole Soyinka, London: Macmillan, 1986.
Gibbs, James. Ed. Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, London: Heinemann, 1981.
---. Collected Plays 1, Oxford: OUP. 1973
---. Collected Plays, Vol.2, Oxford: OUP. 1974
---. Six Plays, London: Methuen, 1984
---. The Bacchae of Euripides in Collected Plays, Vol.1, Oxford: OUP. 1973.
Essays, Autobiographical And Other Important Publications
Myth, Literature and African world, London: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Harper, 1972.
Ake: The Years of Childhood, Random House, 1981.
Before the blackout (Ibadan, n.d.), (Preface, cited in James Gibbs, Study Aid to Kongi’s Harvest) London: Rex Collings, 1973.
Fundamental to our understanding of El Médico de su Honra, and of any other play is the notion that it was for performance and not intended for reading. Therefore, the action, text and spectacle all work together in producing an overall effect upon the audience. Calderón is described as a `craftsman' of drama and is famous for the dramatic devices which appeal to the various senses in order to convey the play's message with greater profundity. However, the seventeenth century playwright was limited by the facilities available to him. The rudimentary nature of their theatres affected the way in which a play was staged and therefore its interpretation. Public theatres were situated in courtyards, or `corrales', surrounded on three sides by private dwellings. A basic, but nevertheless important point is that theatres were generally exposed to the elements. By necessity, plays were performed during daylight hours and inevitably this would affect the presentation of the play. Atmosphere and mood were of paramount importance in a play, and this is of particular significance in El Médico de su Honra, where darkness is crucial both to the plot and the underlying themes.
Imagine a world where everything is black and covered in layers of ash, where dead bodies are scattered throughout the streets and food is scarce. When earth, once green and alive, turns dark and deadly. A story about a man, his son and their will to survive. Within the novel Cormac McCarthy shows how people turn to animalistic and hasty characteristics during a post-apocalyptic time. Their need to survive tops all other circumstances, no matter the consequences. The hardships they face will forever be imprinted in their mind. In the novel, The Road, author Cormac McCarthy utilizes morbid diction and visual imagery to portray a desperate tone when discussing the loss of humanity, proving that desperate times can lead a person to act in careless ways.
compare to the cold war communist accusations during the period he lived in. The play is
Poetry is a form of art in which an exclusive arrangement and choice of words help bring about a desired emotional effect. Robert Frost said that a poem is formed when “an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” His popular poem, "The Road Not Taken," like any other poem, has as many interpretations as it has readers. Using rhetorical analysis, one can break down the meaning(s) of this seemingly simple poem.
As the reader, I was deeply overwhelmed with many mixed emotions such as compassion, sadness, happiness, disgust, remorse, and fear. I have pity for the characters in the book The Road, because “the man” and “the boy” have to pass day to day struggling to survive in a frigid bleak world where food is scarce “They squatted in the road and ate rice and cold beans they’d cooked days ago.” “Already beginning to ferment.”(McCarthy 29). The landscape is blackened, and mankind is almost extinct “The mummied dead everywhere.”(McCarthy 24). As I read on I noticed myself connecting more deeply with the characters. When the boy’s mother takes her own life, I was deeply saddened and my heart broke for “the boy” simply because his mom, someone he cherished and loved so much, had given up on hope and faith and deserted him. I just wan...
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in the post-apocalyptic world that the man and the boy live in, dreams begin to take on the form of a new “reality.” As the novel progresses, the man’s dreams, initially memories remnant of his pre-apocalypse life, become “brighter” as the boy’s dreams become darker and nightmarish. Through the use of color and distinct language, McCarthy emphasizes the contrast between reality and dreams. The man’s reliance on bad dreams to keep him tied to the harsh reality alludes to the hopelessness of the situation; he can never truly escape. McCarthy suggests that those who strive for a life that no longer exists are deluded with false hope. Having dreams is a natural human tendency, but in a world that has become so inhumane, the man can’t even afford to retain this element of being human. The loss of the past is a concept that the characters living in this ashen world struggle with, and McCarthy presents memory as a weakness to be exploited.
In the Novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, survival becomes the biggest quest to life. The novel is set to be as a scene of isolation and banishment from people and places. The author uses the hidden woods as a set of isolation for the characters, in which creates the suspense of traveling to an unspecified destination near the shore. Cormac McCarthy creates a novel on the depth of an imaginative journey, which leads to a road of intensity and despair. The journey to move forward in an apocalyptic world transforms both of the main characters father and son tremendously as time progress. In particular, the boys’ isolation takes him from hope to torment, making him become fearful and imaginative. The images indicate that McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel relies on images, particular verbal choices, and truthful evidence to how isolation affected the son emotionally and physically.
...ny listeners and pupils that agreed with his philosophy. He did not make any actions against the democracy that he despised so greatly.
On the Road is a story about countless elements of life that are relative to almost everyone today. Understanding of time, spirituality, wisdom, reality, poverty, friendship, dissatisfaction, and admiration are all key components to the
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is set sometime in the future after a global disaster in which tells a story of a nameless boy and father who both travel along a highway that stretches to the East coast. This post-apocalyptic novel shows the exposes of terrifying events such as cannibalism, starvation, and not surviving portraying the powerful act of the man protecting his son from all the events in which depicts Cormac McCarthy’s powerful theme of one person sacrificing or doing anything humanly possible for the one they love which generates the power of love.
In Jack Kerouac’s ‘On The Road’, the protagonists embark upon a long, arduous quest for human identity. Their aim is to uncover who they truly are, where they fit in the ‘scheme of things’ and what the meaning of life is. They articulate this desire by speaking, during the novel, of the search for ‘IT’, ‘IT’ being human identity. This ‘IT’ is an intangible thing; something that holds a different meaning for every individual. It encompasses all the things humans yearn for – life answers, the meaning of the universe, happiness, enlightenment, self-fulfilment, ‘beatification’ (as articulated by Kerouac). ‘On the Road’ is the story of a desperate search for ‘IT’, in which the protagonists finally come to realise that ‘IT’ is unattainable and time cannot be defied.
The diction is descriptive and illustrates the disparities and the images of the two roads. The storyteller has to make a choice between two roads, he considers the pros and cons of each one of them, regretting the fact that he cannot travel both of them simultaneously. In the end, he decides that the second one may be better because it’s been only taken by a few. Nonetheless, the narrator explains that he will recall this cherished incident in the future, and states that the decision he made will have a huge impact on his life. After reading the poem, the reader is confronted with the choice of either conforming to society or defying it like Frost did by taking a less stable profession.
“The Road Not Taken” examines the struggles people run into when they come to a place in their life where a life altering decisions has to be made. The man who is described in this poem is traveling when he comes upon “two roads diverged” (1). He then has to choose which path he will take to continue on his journey. After standing at the diversion for a while, he knows he has to make a final decision. One path was worn down and “bent in the undergrowth” (5), so he took the other path, which was described as “perhaps the better claim/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (6-7). The man of the poem begins to ponder about a time when he will be telling his story of the path he took. Although we are not sure if the man regrets his decision or is relieved, he lets us know taking the road less traveled “has made all the difference” (20).
In the poem, “The Road Not Taken”, the speaker has to make a big decision in his life. This poem talks about a person who comes across an intersection or a fork in the road and he has to choose which way to follow. The road is a metaphor of the choices we make in life. As the speaker ponders his choices, he feels strongly that whatever “road” he takes will be for good. So he must weigh his decision well in order to come up with the best choice and not end up regretting it. The speaker considers his thought wisely. He says, “And looked down as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth”, by giving it a proper thought he weighs his choices well and in the end, chooses to follow the road “less traveled”. “The Road Not Taken” signifies a difficult choice in a person’s life that could offer him an easy or hard way out. There is no assurance of what lies ahead; if there will be success or sorrows. But a person has to take risk making up his mind about which way to choose because this is the first step of head...
Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a symbolic poem of the complications people must face in the course of their lives. Although it is not difficult to understand the meaning of the poem through it’s title, it is however hard to interpret what the author means when he describes the roads. Throughout the poem, the two roads appear similar at times and different at others. He uses free imagery to make his poem more complex for the audience.