Fences
August Wilson (1985)
“A Black man who was great enough to have been legendary stands in his own backyard building a fence — and doesn't know whether he's keeping something out or something in.”
Language Register
Black Pittsburgh vernacular rooted in the blues tradition — informal in surface texture, formally structured in rhythm and repetition
Syntax Profile
Troy's sentences are long and spiraling, built on repetition and extension — the rhetorical structure of the blues and the Black oral tradition of signifying. He returns to key phrases ('Death ain't nothing,' 'I told him,' 'that's the thing') as refrains. Rose's sentences are shorter, more direct, and land with greater precision. Cory's speech is the most contemporary — shorter, more fragmented, less oratorically structured. Wilson uses syntax to map the generational distance between father and son.
Figurative Language
High — but Wilson's figurative language is specific to domain. Baseball generates a complete metaphor system: strikes, pitches, batting, the outfield, the foul line. Death appears as a figure Troy literally wrestled. The fence accumulates symbolic meaning without ever becoming purely symbol — it remains a real object being physically built.
Era-Specific Language
A&P Supermarket — major grocery chain, a steady if modest job for working-class men in the 1950s
Labor union — Troy's recourse against the segregated job hierarchy; historically, many unions also excluded Black workers
Baseball commissioner — the institutional power that enforced the color line in Major League Baseball before 1947
Prison — where Troy spent fifteen years, the formative institution of his adult life and the source of his worldview
Archangel Gabriel's instrument of apocalypse — Wilson makes the biblical literal in his character's identity
How Characters Speak — Class & Identity
Troy Maxson
Working-class vernacular elevated by blues rhythm and mythologizing rhetoric. Uses 'ain't,' double negatives, and dropped g's as natural register, but his sentences carry the formal architecture of oral performance.
A man educated by experience, not institution — his intelligence is unmistakable, his vocabulary limited to the world he's been allowed to inhabit. The gap between his capacity and his opportunity is the play's tragedy.
Rose Maxson
Same vernacular base as Troy, but more restrained — fewer tall tales, less rhetorical elaboration. Her power is in precision rather than volume.
A woman who has learned that words cost something. She uses language economically because she has spent herself generously in other ways. Her great speech in Act One is notable precisely because it is her most extended utterance in the play — she saves it for the moment that demands it.
Cory Maxson
Younger, more contemporary speech patterns. Less blues-inflected than Troy, more influenced by his schooling and the football world. His language hasn't fully formed — it's in between registers.
The generation Wilson is tracking: Black men who might move into a different relationship to language and institutions if given the chance. Troy reads Cory's different speech as distance, as putting on airs. It is actually the sound of a door Troy helped open, even by trying to close it.
Bono
Casual, understated — the verbal register of a man who knows when to say less. His most important speeches are questions, not statements.
The role of the witness. Bono sees everything and says just enough. His friendship with Troy is one of the few places in the play where honesty is possible, and it functions through indirection rather than confrontation.
Gabriel
Fragmented, joyful, non-linear — his speech doesn't follow cause-and-effect logic because his injury has reorganized his inner world. He speaks in declarations, not arguments.
Wilson uses Gabriel's 'broken' speech to deliver some of the play's most direct truths. Gabriel is not wrong about anything important. The world that labeled him incompetent is the same world that sent him to war and then housed him in an institution. His speech is the sound of a man the system could not fully contain.
Lyons
Smoother, more urban, musician's speech — he code-switches between Troy's vernacular and a hipper register that signals his different world.
A man who escaped Troy's orbit early (because Troy was in prison) and developed differently. He is not better or worse than Cory — he is what happens when the father is absent instead of present and blocking.
Narrator's Voice
Fences has no narrator — it is pure drama. But Wilson's stage directions function as a kind of narrative voice: spare, precise, and occasionally lyrical, they describe not just what to see but what it means. 'The lights go down to black' is a statement of fact. 'Gabriel dances in a dance of atavistic signature and ritual' is interpretation.
Tone Progression
Act One, Scenes 1-2
Warm, communal, comic
Troy holds court, tall tales abound, the Friday ritual establishes safety. The yard feels abundant even in poverty.
Act One, Scenes 3-4
Building pressure, unease, collision
The conflict with Cory sharpens. Bono's questions about Alberta accumulate. The warmth of the opening is not gone but is strained.
Act One, Scene 4 (Alberta revelation)
Shock, grief, moral confrontation
The register shifts entirely. Rose's speech strips the play of comfortable ambiguity. Everything before this is reread.
Act Two, Scene 1
Devastated, violent, determined
Alberta dead, baby brought home, Cory expelled, fence completed. Wilson compresses four catastrophes into one scene. The tone is that of someone who has survived something they weren't sure they could survive.
Act Two, Scene 2 (1965)
Elegiac, unresolved, transcendent
Eight years later. Loss settled into fact. The final scene moves through grief, reconciliation, and Gabriel's dance into something that cannot be named — grace, perhaps, or its theatrical equivalent.
Stylistic Comparisons
- Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman — both are plays about fathers destroying sons while trying to protect them from a dream they've already lost
- Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night — the same family-as-wound structure, but Wilson's family is defined by race in a way O'Neill's cannot be
- Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun — set in the same era, Black family in a northern city, the same confrontation with the American Dream, but Hansberry's family is more unified; Wilson's is more broken
Key Vocabulary from This Book
Notable words used in this text — click to see full definitions