Fences Blog #10

        As I read through the play Fences by August Wilson, my opinion of the main character Troy changed from a powerful teacher to a villain as the play continued. When the play opens, Troy returns from a night out on the town with his friend Bono. He has just gotten paid and wants to spend time with his wife and convince his son Cory to get a job at the store. While he often illustrated his points offensively and harshly, I didn’t think of Troy as an antagonist or obstacle. He was simply trying to do what he thought was right for his son. However, as the play progressed, new details about Troy began to come to light and the motivation behind his choices was revealed. During his youth, Troy had no mother. His father worked on a sharecropping plantation while trying to take care of Troy and his 11 siblings. One day while getting “cozy” with a girl, Troy’s father appeared and beat Troy with a leather strap. While Troy thought that his father didn’t want him getting into that kind of thing at the young age of 14, his father actually wanted the young girl to himself, and this altercation with his father caused Troy to run away, but he also states "right there is where I became a man... at fourteen years of age (52)". Troy began to make his way in life not through honest work like he preaches to his son Cory, but through robbery and theft. However, this line of work didn’t last as one day while robbing someone, they pulled out a gun and shot Troy, causing Troy to respond by stabbing them with his knife. This stunt landed Troy in prison for 15 years and resulted in him missing his first son Lyons’s childhood. While in prison, Troy met Bono and began to play baseball. After becoming a free man, Troy played in the negro leagues and found work as a garbage collector while deciding to settle down with a woman named Rose and have another son named Cory. While great in the negro leagues, Troy’s baseball career never properly progressed into the MLB as the two leagues were still segregated at the time, so he never got his shot to play baseball professionally. All this to say, Troy never got the life he wanted. He was held back by his father, society’s racist tendencies, or held back by literal iron bars during his time in prison. Yet, these unfortunate events in Troy's life don’t justify his actions later in the play. Firstly, he goes behind his son’s back to stop him from being recruited to play football and stunting what could have been a promising career. He also cheats on his wife and has a child with another woman, steals from his mentally handicapped brother, and physically beats up his own son. Troy is the devil. Not only does he talk about the devil constantly and boast about how he has cheated death more than once, but in writing this, I’ve also realized that Troy has more or less committed the seven deadly sins. While he might’ve started as a protagonist to root for in taking on the discrimination in the garbage collection business, Troy devolves into the devil. A vengeful, envious, wrathful, greedy, and lustful person who in the end, destroys the lives of those around him and finds no redemption.