All My Sons: Significance of title

All My Sons is a play that studies the denial of guilt and social responsibility of a man versus his own self-interest. In AMS, the play shows how Chris Keller, a self righteous man wrecked by survivor's guilt, ultimately confronts the truth of his father's perjury. The bracket of lies and wrongdoing are hastily patched over by a veneer of an idyllic, desirable middle class suburban lifestyle of the Kellers, reflective of the pragmatic American Dream in post-war America. The title is significant in its ambiguity that is open for interpretation as to whether it is of reference to a microscopic view of family ties, or that it is answerable to the larger community as a social contract bound by the altruistic love a man can possibly have for a man. Lastly, it is also a foreshadowing of the various Christian allusions infused into the play.

The title is a foreshadow of the various Christian allusions infused into the play. For example, the scene opens up to a quintessential suburban home of the Kellers. However, a jarring juxtaposition of a broken apple tree (planted to commemorate Larry's death) alludes to the broken eden of the Keller household. Furthermore, Chris Keller in name is already an obvious reference to Christ, and further exemplified in his larger ideals of altruism, although borderlining on martyrdom. Also, Joe Keller, in response to Chris, screams, "A man can't be a Jesus in this world!" This statement was made to project the very idea that the altruistic love Chris expected 'an average Joe' to quantify towards protecting the sovereignty of the community as he would all his own sons, is not realistic in a pragmatic world of "the great big dogs" where "you don't love a man here, you eat him!" Ultimately, the title of All My Sons could refer the altruism Christ portrayed in his cruxification, reflected in Larry in his attempt to atone for his father's ultimate betrayal to all his sons under his social contract by sacrificing himself. However, it could also refer to the subtle underlying fact that just as Christ is referred to as the Son of Man, so was the prophet Ezekiel, except that in Ezekiel's manner it stresses on his humility, a way of saying he is completely a mere human creature in contrast to the glory of God. Miller, through the significant Christian allusions of his title, tries to show that this is what Joe is, a mere mortal susceptible to mistakes rather than the glorified figure that all his sons, Larry and Chris, had regarded him to be - "I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father."

All in all, by offering a human paradigm of salvation of differing interests, that cannot by its very nature succeed, All My Sons is a thought provoking title that in steeped in metaphor and meaning, and in fact contrasting at times. This is also by itself a consolation Miller offers its readers; that it is hard to put a finger on what or whom is at fault when there are many unanswerable paradoxes where hardly anyone is without blame.

a short reading

The Ambivalence of the Colonized

by Robert Reese, 2003

Homi Bhaba writes that "colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite" (86). The colonizer wants and needs the colonized to be similar to himself, but not the same. If the native continues to behave in his traditional ways, he brings no economic gain to the colonizer. But, if the colonized changes too much and is found to be exactly the same as the colonizer, the colonizer is left with no argument for his supremacy. As Bhaba puts it, "in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference" (86). These slippages, excesses, and differences are brought to the modern, colonized world by the natives in all aspects of their existences, but especially in their beliefs on religion and family. The characters in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood serve as good examples of this ambivalence that colonialism depends on. Native characters living in the colonial world bring their own traditions and beliefs with them which prevent them from ever fully becoming the same as the white man.

Religious beliefs are at the core of what makes up a person. Even when an individual travels from one world to another, such as from traditional life to colonial life, his religion rarely leaves him entirely. Religious beliefs help keep the colonized from fully emulating the colonizer. In Death and the King's Horseman, the appearance of the white Mr. and Mrs. Pilkings in ceremonial death masks elicits a fear in both the Muslim Amusa and the Christian Joseph, proving that they have not completely left their traditional religious beliefs behind. After Mr. Pilkings orders Amusa to speak to him, Amusa responds, "Sir, it is a matter of death. How can man talk against death to person in uniform of death?" (19). Because of his traditional beliefs, Amusa sees Pilkings in the mask as a representative of death, not just as a man wearing a mask. And, judging by Pilkings' comments about Amusa, it would seem that Amusa had abandoned much more of his religion than the other natives: "I swear by you at the club you know--thank God for Amusa, he doesn't believe in any mumbo-jumbo. And now look at you!" (19). The man whom the colonizer thought had abandoned his native religion turned out to still hold many of his core beliefs.

Even though Joseph, a servant to the Pilkingses, had more thoroughly converted to Christianity than Amusa had to Islam, Mr. Pilkings still does not recognize him as a full Christian. Upon seeing Mr. Pilkings in the death mask, Joseph confirmed that "it has no power" to him anymore (21). Mr. Pilkings was happy that Joseph's conversion to Christianity had created some "sanity" in him, but just moments later made a course remark that would have offended any Christian: "It's only two years since your conversion. Don't tell me all that holy water nonsense also wiped out your tribal memory" (24). Joseph, thinking himself a true Christian, is horrified by this remark, as is Mr. Pilkings' wife. She responds to her husband, "Calling holy water nonsense to our Joseph is like insulting the Virgin Mary before a Roman Catholic" (24). Mr. Pilkings' finds his wife's worries ridiculous. He, the colonizer, cannot see the colonized Joseph as being an absolute member of the Christian religion. This again points back to the ambivalence that colonization depends on: even though a native may have converted to Christianity, he is not truly a Christian because he is expected to have brought some of his traditional beliefs with him, keeping him separate from the white man.

In The Joys of Motherhood, Nnaife and Nnu Ego bring their traditional beliefs to the modern religion even more than Amusa and Joseph did. Nnaife only attends church so that he is able to keep his job. He worries when he learns that his wife is pregnant that because they had not yet been married in the Christian church that "they will remove our names from the church register and Madam will not like it. I may even lose my job" (50). Here Nnaife shows that he only affiliates himself with the church to protect his job. Later, when he no longer works for Dr. and Mrs. Meers, Nnaife disobeys the church rules on monogamy and inherits one of his deceased brother's wives. Because he no longer needed the church to keep his job, he abandoned it, displaying that he was not truly a believer of the Christian faith. Nnu Ego appears to be even less converted to Christianity. She never truly abandons her traditional beliefs. Throughout the novel, she refers to her chi and, in the end, she is even made into a goddess herself. When she first moved to the city, Nnu Ego admitted that she "did not understand what Christianity was all about," and as she continued attending church she found that it had become "monotonous attending week after week" (48). Unlike Joseph and Amusa, Nnu Ego never even appears to accept the colonial religion as her own. Her traditional beliefs continue to guide her throughout the story. Nnu Ego first realizes that she is pregnant for a second time because of a conversation with her chi, long after she has been living in Lagos, the white man's city. After the conversation in a dream with her chi, Nnu Ego realized that it would be "difficult to explain it to him. This she knew was a bond between her and her chi and her coming child. Nnaife had little to do with it. He was just the father" (78). She believed that the upcoming child was more closely related to her chi than to its father. This belief blatantly contradicted both Christian and scientific views held at the time that said the father was very important in the process. Even after her death, Nnu Ego shows that she is not a true Christian, even though she may have attended church. She is made into a fertility goddess. Certainly, no Christian woman could become a goddess. Neither Nnaife nor Nnu Ego's traditional religious views were ever superceded by colonial religion. They lived in the ambivalence of being modern, colonized individuals yet retaining traditional, native religious beliefs.

Another core element of what makes up an individual is his beliefs on family life. Therefore, the native's traditional family roles were also carried into the colonial world, further contributing to his ambivalence. The previously mentioned inheritance of a second wife by Nnaife serves as a good example. Even though he was working in a low paying job as a grass cutter, he was expected by his family to inherit his deceased brother's wife Adaku. If he had inherited his brother's wives in the traditional farm setting, he would have been able to support the suddenly larger family by increasing his farming profits by using the children as additional labor. However, in Lagos, he did not have a farm that needed workers. Instead, he had to pay for schooling for his children; they were an expense, not a source of income. The traditional family structure clashed with colonial modernity and Nnaife was forced to try to feed a large traditional family in the colonizer's new world.

A more dramatic instance of traditional familial beliefs clashing with colonial life comes at the end of Death and the King's Horseman when Elesin's son, Olunde, fulfills the duty that Elesin failed. In Yoruban tradition, the king's horseman, Elesin, was required to die at a specific time in order to accompany his king to the afterworld. Olunde had come home from medical school in England upon hearing of the king's death, expecting his father's to follow soon after. When his father failed to die, Olunde takes his father's place because, as a local market woman put it, "he could not bear to let honour fly out of doors" (61). Even though Olunde had traveled to the colonizer's world and was well on his way to becoming a colonial doctor, his sense of duty to his family was so strong that he died because of it. Very much like Nnaife, Olunde is here brought into a state of ambivalence by being required to both be a modern, colonial man and to respect his traditional family beliefs.

The incomplete mimicry that the characters in The Joys of Motherhood and Death and the King's Horseman have to face creates many problems for them. They are forced to face conflicting religious beliefs, poverty, and even untimely death because they are not able to leave all their traditions behind them when they move to the colonial world. The natives' traditions, mixed with new ideas from the colonialist's world, create a structure of ambivalence that traps the colonized and prevents him from ever becoming the same as the colonizer.

Works Cited

Bhaba, Homi. The Location of Culture.

Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers, 1994.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King's Horseman. New York: Norton, 2003.

Colonizing is often stereotyped to seem that the colonial masters are apathetic and knowledgeable, helping the colonies to become more advanced, and the natives are portrayed as violent, uncultured and uncivilized, yet too docile to put up much of a collective struggle against being colonized.

In Soyinka's DATKH he has stressed anti colonialism, as well as a showcase of negritude in romanticizing the African culture has never been his aim.

food for thought

Question: Was the praise singer real?

The praise singer exists throughout the entire story, often seeming to be the voice of reason or possibly even the Horseman’s conscience. He disappears after the ritual death is averted, as if to vanish when our protagonist ignores his conscience.

- credits: Oliver Haughton on ejockstill @ wordpress

I didn't realize the fact that the Praise Singer no longer appears in the play after the failure of the sacrificial death.

an introduction of sorts

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things Fall Apart
The centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.


W.B Yeats, The Second Coming
--




It should be such a coincidence that the epigraph of TFA by Chinua Achebe should fit so well for DATKH. It should be such a coincidence life has thrown me yet another african text for my literature syllabus. I was just getting ready for Emma. But I digress.






this is a personal space for literature analysis and findings. a place I will obediently update because it is a class assignment. credits for articles belong to its authors and/or original sources as embedded below every article featured here. currently doing Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka.

peace out

xx

Of Olunde and Elesin

Death and the King's Horseman: A Character Analysis of Olunde

J. L. Petty, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Sep 10, 2010 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites. Start Here."

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No commentary can express the overwhelmingly controversial topics Wole Soyinka embarks upon in his drama "Death and the King's Horseman". This literary piece is multi-faceted because it embraces issues of race, religion, and culture. "Death and the Kings's Horseman" is about the ritual suicide of a horseman of a tribal chief that is prevented by British officials because of its barbaric nature. As a result to this intervention, the tribal ritual is disrupted causing the horsemen's son, Olunde, to sacrifice himself in order to take the place of his father and create peace within the tribe. This great loss in effect influences Elesin, the horsemen, to take his own life near the end of the play. It is evident that the character of Olunde is clashing between two cultures, embodies more courage than his father, possesses a sense of responsibility and loyalty to his tribe, and plays a heroic figure in Soyinka's piece. 
(Character analysis of Olunde by author)


Noticeably, Olunde's character appears to be struggling between two worlds. His origen is from Nigeria , however, he studies medicine in Europe. This clash in culture could definitely be an issue for him on many levels as far as challenging his allegiance to his tribe and their rituals, thus,conforming to british culture. Contrary to british belief, as far as their prejudices toward the barbaric nature of sacrificial suicide, Olunde seems to agree with his tribal rituals. Soyinka doesn't introduce Olunde's character until Olunde decides to visit Mr. Pilkings in regards to making funeral arrangements for his father, that he has already presumed dead.

To his surprise, Olunde discovers that his father is still alive because he is confronted by him at the Pilking's house.Leading up to this rivoting climax, Olunde seems to be in disbelief that his father did not carry out the ritual. Evidence to support this idea can be found in this exerpt:

" All these things are apart of it. And anyway,my father has been dead in my mind for nearly a month.Ever since I learnt of the King's death.I've lived with my bereavement so long now that I cannot think of him alive.On that journey on the boat , I kept my mind on my duties as the one who must perform the rites over his body. I went through it all again in my mind as he himself had taught me. I didn't want to do anything wrong, something which might jeopardise the welfare of my people (p.57)."

Olunde's character disowns his father for this fact. One would presume that Olunde's character is highly dissapointed in his father's actions. He appeared outraged by the fact that Elesin wouldn't keep his allegiance to his people regardless to whether or not legal authorities attempted to prevent his fate.
Contrary to Elesin, the character of Olunde presents himself as having more courage than his father. This character trait is implied by the fact that Olunde allowed himself to be sacrificed, something that his father wouldn't do. Even though, his character plays a relatively small part in the play, he obtains a lot of significance and noteriety by commiting this action because in effect Elesin's guilt encourages him to kill himself. Dissapointment drove Olunde to take matters into his own hands. Evidence to support Olunde's dissapointment in his father can be found in the following passage during a discussion between the charcaters of Iyaloja and Elesin:
"Olunde would have done it .
The chief's asked him to speak
the words but he said no , not
while you lived( p.73)."
The characters of Olunde and Elesin contrasts significantly. In the beginning of the play, Elesin seemed very anxious about this sacrificial ritual. He even begins to tell a story called the " Not-I-Bird" that is vey similar to that of another children's story "Chicken Little". Soyinka implies to the audience that Elesin is much like the Not Bird, when death is concerned. Olunde's character is more responsible and trustworthy unlike Elesin's character whom is portrayed as a womanizeing bigot.

Olunde's character has a strong sense of loyalty to his tribe and unconditional respect for its customs. Leaving behind his privilleged life of studying medicine in Europe, Olunde doesn't hesitate or lean towards the opinions of british officials when he returns to Nigeria. At the Pilking's House, Olunde wasn't swayed easily by Mr.Pilking's opinions and attempts a preventing the ritual, it was as if Olunde was disregarding them. Evidence to prove Olunde's dilligence can be found in the following lines:

" Mr. Pilkings, I appreciate what you tried to do.
I want you to believe that.I can only tell you
It would have been a terrible calamity if you'd
succeeded( p.57)."

Olunde's character plays a very heroic role in the real life inspired play, " Death and the the King's Horseman". Soyinka portrays Olunde's character as being somewhat a pillar to their society. He voluntarily gives up all that he has worked for in Eurpoe to maintain the cosmic well being of his culture, who he technically isn't even apart of anymore being that he is experiencing another way of life somewhere else. Wole Soyinka purposely portrays Olunde's death as a tragedy because it could have been prevented. He also places major emphasis on how much the character had to loose by letting the audience know that Olunde's character was dilligently committed to studying medicine prior to this controversial uproar.This type of foreshadowing reveals the irony of how Olunde will soon throw away all of his accmplishments for the belief of his people. Evidence supporting this can be found in this exerpt, when Jane is begging Olunde not to do anything that may discourage him from his goals of becoming a doctor:

" Olunde, please...promise me something.

Whatever you do, don't throw away what you have started to do.You want to be a

doctor.My husband and I believe you will make an excellent one, sympathetic and competent. Don't let anything make you throw away your training (p.55)"

Olunde's character is definitely a significant role in " Death and the King's Horseman". His nobility, heroism, and loyalty are compelling character traits to be analyzed and discussed for further review. This clashing in culture, opinion, and ethical standard are continuous antagonistc forces that distresses the character of Olunde through out his segments of the play. Soyinka briliiantly described him as a ranking of higher society and captures the irony of his charater versus the charater of Elesin, his father, with ease. The character of Olunde contributes a much needed depth and dramatic climax to this story of ritual versus ethics and tradition versus law.

Credits: (source)




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This is an article that I have read online with regards to DATKH. The lines I highlighted in grey is an excerpt from the play itself. The very words from Olunde's mouth about his father's death explicitly tells

us the vast difference between the ways death is perceived by the two different cultures. The Western culture is likely to view Olunde's words with shock, due to the very calm nature of Olunde's tone which states his peace of mind about his father's willful death in a matter-of-fact tone, "Ever since I learnt of the King's death.I've lived with my bereavement so long now that I cannot think of him alive." 

The Western culture views death as a singular category, as the be all and end all of life, that it should be grieved upon as a loss. 

However, Yoruban culture views death differently. To them, it is but a transitional phase into the next chapter of existence. As such, death is not taboo-talk; it is not mourned nor grieved over. Olunde, for what his years abroad was worth, still holds on to these traditional views.

Overall, I found the analysis of this article to (possibly have been written at 2am after drinks I mean check out the spelling) be anchored rather subjectively - condemning Elesin Oba and portraying Olunde as the role model. I feel that Soyinka's intended portrayal of any character in the novel is not as simplistic in shades of black or white. Yoruban culture values respect for their elders, amongst other morals. As such, Olunde's disowning of his father, regardless of his failure to carry out his duty, is not entirely without fault. This is also mentioned in the novel in Scene 5 where Pilkings tries his best to - in what he thought was - comfort Elesin, where Pilkings mentions: "That was in the heat of the moment. I spoke to him and...if you want to know, he wishes he could cut out his tongue for uttering the words he did." This is a case in point where it features one of the underlying tones of the novel - that as an individual  who does his personal best to fulfil his duty, even with the best of intents, it is still possible to fail and hurt others around him regardless of intention. This is a quiet lamentation against the condemnation of Elesin's fall from grace in his failure to uphold his duty.