Dysfunctional Family In Fences

August Wilson’s Fences is a play about Troy Maxson, and how his values influence his family’s. The play takes place in 1950’s Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Troy Maxson is a black, middle aged man working for a garbage company. Each member of the Maxson family has a special relationship with Troy, that affects their behavior throughout the play. In life you learn the most from your parents. They teach you how to walk, speak, and respect one another. Your parents also give you a set of values for life. As you grow up as your own individual, your values will change from your parents. There will be things that are much more important to you, and not as important to them. In the play Fences Troy Maxson has a very strong set of values that he believes are true in how you should live life. Troy imposes these values on everyone in his family to the best of his ability. Each character in Fences is at a different stage in their life, so Troy can’t push his values onto characters that already have their own beliefs. The character that Troy has the most influence on in the play is Cory. Troy is in Cory’s life throughout his childhood, and as his father Cory must respect Troy. Troy is very firm with Cory, because he wants Cory to be successful. Cory has a dream of becoming a football player, and this does not follow Troy’s values. Troy influences Cory so much that Cory will always be like Troy whether he realizes it or not. “Your daddy wanted you to be everything he wasn’t … and at

August Wilson’s play, “Fences”, is a play about a father who is trying to make do to support his family as well as come to terms with his boisterous upbringing and the collapse of his Major League Baseball career. The Father, Troy Maxson, resents his son’s painless childhood and chances to pursue a college level football career. In multiple excerpts from the play, Troy brutally lectures his son Cory about life and adulthood. He uses short and incomplete sentences, rhetorical questions, repetition, connections from his past, and current examples to support his claim: life is not about being liked, but being treated with righteousness.

Fences written by August Wilson is an award winning drama that depicts an African-America family who lives in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania during the 1950’s. During this time, the Mason’s reveal the struggles working as a garbage man, providing for his family and excepting life as is. The end of segregation began, more opportunities for African American people were accessible. Troy, who’s the father the Cory and husband of Rose has shoes fill as a working African America man. He is the family breadwinner and plays the dominant role in the play. Troy’s childhood was pretty rough growing up on a farm of 11 children. Overtime, he realizes the change of society. He builds a friendship fellow sanitation worker, Jim Bono while in the penitentiary. Troy planned to build a fence around his house to control the number of people on his property. The fence also plays a symbolic role throughout the drama. These motives and characteristics control is what makes Troy the friend, father, worker, and husband he is today.

Throughout time there have always been conflicts of morality and injustice. August Wilson wrote this play about issues that were prevalent in the 1950’s but also still are sadly present today. In Fences, there is an abundance of evidence of cultural clashes. In this play these clashes span over racial, generational, and even gender lines and its effects on the characters.

In today’s society, family is often attempted to be organized within a social structure. Within this structure family typically is consisted of mom, dad, daughter, and son. However, many families do not fit into this configuration. These families may include same sex couples, separated or divorced families, extended families, or even blended families. Even though these families may be happy and healthy, to many they are not considered real families. Going along with the topic of imperfect families, both Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Rodriguez try to break down the traditional family structure through their writing. While Kingsolver’s “Stone Soup” and Rodriguez’s “Family Values” explore the ideas of different family structures and traditional American values, “Stone Soup” breaks down what an actual family is like while “Family Values” expresses the value of family in different cultures.

In Fences, August Wilson introduces an African American family whose life is based around a fence. In the dirt yard of the Maxson’s house, many relationships come to blossom and wither here. The main character, Troy Maxson, prevents anyone from intruding into his life by surrounding himself around a literal and metaphorical fence that affects his relationships with his wife, son, and mortality.

The Family Crucible, written by Augustus Napier and Carl Whitaker (1978), exemplifies a fragmented family system. The family consists of David a VIP lawyer, Carolyn an angry mother, Claudia an enraged teenager, Don the 11-year-old peacemaker, and six-year-old Laura. Co-therapists, Napier and Whitaker have taken on the task of working with the family using a systemic approach to conceptualize the family’s difficulties. Herein, this writer will describe how Whitaker and Napier depict the family struggles, how these struggles relate to the family unit in deference to an individual focus, and how

Conflicts and tensions between family members and friends are key elements in August Wilson's play, Fences. The main character, Troy Maxon, has struggled his whole life to be a responsible person and fulfill his duties in any role that he is meant to play. In turn, however, he has created conflict through his forbidding manner. The author illustrates how the effects of Troy's stern upbringing cause him to pass along a legacy of bitterness and anger which creates tension and conflict in his relationships with his family.

An American engineer, technician, and author, Lee Iacocca, once said, “The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works, is the family.” Here, Iacocca shows how a family relationship should look like regardless of the circumstances. Unfortunately this cannot be the case with many families because of social justice issues around the world. Social injustice, often caused by religious differences, intellectual disabilities, and lack of economic prosperity, could easily change family relationships. This could be shown in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel, the Science fiction novel Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, and the memoir

Family is not always the easiest thing to deal with as families always seem to get into disagreements. This is shown in the play “Fences” by August Wilson which is full of tension between the main character, Troy, and his various family members. Troy’s many bad decisions and mistakes cause a lot of hate to be directed at him and a lot of arguments ensue throughout the play. August Wilson uses many narrative elements in the play to make it more interesting and show the tension more clearly. Overall, in the play “Fences” August Wilson uses narrative elements such as father-son conflict, contrasting motifs, and characterization to show characters’ problems to create tension between characters.

In the story of “Fences” and also “A Doll House” we will compare the plot of change. Sometimes change is accepted and others it is not. One thing that the reader will become aware of is that times change and people change. Change is a constant thing, whether talking about society as a whole or about the people that make up that society. One thing is for sure and that is that there will always be change. In the story “A Doll House” we will see how change within two main character’s will change the family dynamics of a picture perfect family. The thing that the reader does not expect it the tragic ending that does happen within this picture perfect family. In the story “Fences” we will find how the character’s unwillingness to accept change will ultimately lead to the demise of his family life that he has. Not only does this demise come from his unwillingness to accept change but because he wants change but in very different ways than what society has to offer.

Plays, “Fences” and “A Raisin in the Sun” share similar plots. They take place in the mid-western United States in the 1950’s and explore the family dynamics of the African-American Family and the paradigmatic shift it experienced between two generations. The older generation, who could remember slavery by first-hand experience or by being born during a time when success for the average African-Americans was systematically stifled by racist and unconstitutional laws that were put in place when slavery was legal, and the young generation that began to show some sense of entitlement, had begun to overcome institutional barriers to succeed and empower

Anywhere you go in the world, will see examples of families that lack unity and other vital core values. Children across the globe suffer from parents seeking their own interests instead of their children’s wellbeing. In Ellen Foster, many themes continually resurface which express the emphasis that Gibbons places on the values of a strong family unit. Gibbons repeatedly emphasizes the importance of a strong family unit through the experiences of Ellen: a strong-willed girl whose increasingly dangerous home life results in her life being turned upside down.

The statement in the play “Fences” represents Miller’s concept of tragic heroism since the changing social environment of the 1950’s no longer supported Troy’s views on his son and other African American’s limited opportunities for success. For instance in the statement Rose was referring to Troy being oblivious to the shifts made in College athletics that integrated black athletes into their teams. Rose also stated earlier in the play, “They got lots of colored boys playing ball now. Baseball and football” (537). In spite of the opportunity Cory had to play College football, Troy’s previous experiences with racism in baseball leave him unwilling to believe his son won’t face the same predicament. In terms of themes relatable to current events,

The story under discussion is a perfect reflection of the idea that, “[b]ehind … the seemingly perfect suburban landscape there are personal traumas and deeply rooted psychological problems within the families: dysfunctional marriages and families, adultery, mendacity, and false parent-child relationships” (Szélpál, par. 19).