THE PLOT SUMMARY OF FENCES BY August Wilson
Plot Summary of Fences
Fences is divided into two acts. Act One is comprised of four scenes and Act Two has five. The play begins on a Friday, Troy and Bono's payday. Troy and Bono go to Troy's house for their weekly ritual of drinking and talking. Troy has asked Mr. Rand, their boss, why the black employees aren't allowed to drive the garbage trucks, only to lift the garbage. Bono thinks Troy is cheating on his wife, Rose. Troy and Rose's son, Cory, has been recruited by a college football team. Troy was in the Negro Leagues but never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because he got too old to play just as the Major Leagues began accepting black players. Troy goes into a long epic story about his struggle in July of 1943 with death. Lyons shows up at the house because he knows it is Troy's payday. Rose reminds Troy about the fence she's asked him to finish building.
Cory and Troy work on the fence. Cory breaks the news to Troy that he has given away his job at the local grocery store, the A&P, during the football season. Cory begs Troy to let him play because a coach from North Carolina is coming all the way to Pittsburgh to see Cory play. Troy refuses and demands Cory to get his job back.
Act One, scene four takes place on Friday and mirrors scene one. Troy has won his case and has been assigned as the first colored garbage truck driver in the city. Bono and Troy remember their fathers and their childhood experiences of leaving home in the south and moving north. Cory comes home enraged after finding out that Troy told the football coach that Cory may not play on the team. Troy warns Cory that his insubordinance is "strike one," against him.
Troy bails his brother Gabriel out of jail. Bono and Troy work on the fence. Bono explains to Troy and Cory that Rose wants the fence because she loves her family and wants to keep close to her love. Troy admits to Bono that he is having an affair with Alberta. Bono bets Troy that if he finishes building the fence for Rose, Bono will buy his wife, Lucille the refrigerator he has promised her for a long time. Troy tells Rose about a hearing in three weeks to determine whether or not Gabriel should be recommitted to an asylum. Troy tells Rose about his affair. Rose accuses Troy of taking and not giving. Troy grabs Rose's arm. Cory grabs Troy from behind. They fight and Troy wins. Troy calls "strike two" on Cory.
Six months later, Troy says he is going over to the hospital to see Alberta who went into labor early. Rose tells Troy that Gabriel has been taken away to the asylum because Troy couldn't read the papers and signed him away. Alberta had a baby girl but died during childbirth. Troy challenges Death to come and get him after he builds a fence. Troy brings home his baby, Raynell. Rose takes in Raynell as her own child, but refuses to be dutiful as Troy's wife.
On Troy's payday, Bono shows up unexpectedly. Troy and Bono acknowledge how each man made good on his bet about the fence and the refrigerator. Troy insists that Cory leave the house and provide for himself. Cory brings up Troy's recent failings with Rose. Cory points out that the house and property, from which Troy is throwing Cory out, should actually be owned by Gabriel whose government checks paid for most of the mortgage payments. Troy physically attacks Cory. Troy kicks Cory out of the house for good. Cory leaves. Troy swings the baseball bat in the air, taunting Death.
Eight years later, Raynell plays in her newly planted garden. Troy has died from a heart attack. Cory returns home from the Marines to attend Troy's funeral. Lyons and Bono join Rose too. Cory refuses to attend. Rose teaches Cory that not attending Troy's funeral does not make Cory a man. Raynell and Cory sing one of Troy's father's blues songs. Gabriel turns up, released or escaped from the mental hospital. Gabe blows his trumpet but no sound comes out. He tries again but the trumpet will not play. Disappointed and hurt, Gabriel dances. He makes a cry and the Heavens open wide. He says, "That's the way that goes," and the play ends
Fences | Symbols
Baseball
Throughout Fences baseball is a complex symbol of fair play, injustice, and freedom. Troy spent years in prison as a young man because he killed someone in self-defense. While in prison he learned how to play baseball. The baseball field was the one place where Troy truly excelled, and the rules were clear. Despite Troy's immense talent, his dream of playing in Major League Baseball, which would have provided him fortune and fame, was denied—either because of the color barrier or because he was too old when he got out of prison, or both. This disappointment shaped Troy's later life and caused him to have a love-hate relationship with baseball and other sports.
When trying to express himself, Troy often uses baseball terminology. During the climax of the play, when Troy confesses to Rose about his affair with Alberta, he uses baseball language to describe his actions. When describing how his mistress makes him feel, he says, "I just might be able to steal second." He contrasts this with the past 18 years, which he feels he has spent standing on first base. The baseball terms symbolize daring and freedom versus stability and safety.
Baseball symbolism also describes Troy's relationship with his son. In this case Cory is in the batter's box and Troy is the umpire. As the issues with Cory boil and eventually explode, Troy describes each incident as a strike and the final blow-up as a strikeout. The final incident between the two literally includes a baseball bat. Troy's handling of his relationship with his son is arguably his biggest mistake in the play. His anger and frustration, initially caused by his failure to join the major leagues, blinds him to his son's needs and the changing times.
When Troy talks about his glorious past, it involves baseball. Both Bono and Lyons recall Troy's prowess on the field, both in the prison league and the Negro Leagues, where Troy was apparently playing when he met Rose. It is the time when he was most alive and full of hope. Baseball, however, is also part of Troy's downfall, and it comes to symbolize his mistakes as well.
Mr. Death
Death is personified in Fences. It is a presence throughout the text and looms over the action. Troy first mentions Mr. Death when describing a battle he had with pneumonia. He said, "What you want, Mr. Death? ... You done brought your army to be getting me?" In this early scene, Troy seems all powerful. His family and friends listen to his stories and look up to him.
But death continues to loom. Troy recognizes death is ever-present and says, "Ain't nothing wrong with talking about death. That's part of life. Everybody gonna die." In several scenes Troy addresses Death personally. He insists it stay away or be ready to fight. Troy declares he will build the fence not for Rose but to keep Death out.
As the play continues, Troy's all-powerful image begins to crumble, leaving the character vulnerable to death. Here, the symbolism of death is intertwined with that of baseball and the three-strikes rule. First Alberta dies in childbirth. After her infant daughter's acceptance into the Maxson family, things stabilize. Death strikes again, however, when the altercation occurs between Troy and Cory. When Troy's relationship with Rose withers, he has a third strike against him. Finally, Mr. Death arrives and takes Troy himself.
Troy's vigilance is no match for Mr. Death. The epic battle was one Troy could win as a young and exceptionally strong man. His vitality contrasts with that of his brother, who was grievously injured in World War II. But inevitably, as Troy ages, death takes its toll.
Fences
Rose loves her family. She wants to keep everyone together and plays peacemaker to achieve this end. The fence she wants Troy and Cory to build around the yard symbolizes her goal. Troy and Cory can't understand why she wants the fence, but Bono can. He says to them, "People ... build fences to keep people in. Rose wants to hold on ... She loves you." Troy and Cory's inability to understand why they need the fence is what makes it all the more necessary. The two most important people in her life do not see their house as a loving one and are aching to get out.
The one civil conversation Troy and Cory have is when they begin working on the fence. While building the fence, Cory tells Troy he should buy a television. Troy eventually agrees to form a partnership; if Cory can raise half the money for the television, Troy will match it. The fence-building project comes too late, however, and is not strong enough to hold the family together
Themes of Fences
Blackness and Race Relations
Set in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, Fences explores the experience of one black family living in the era of segregation and a burgeoning black rights movement, exposing, at the heart of its characters’ psychology, a dynamic between the inner world of a black community and the expanse of white power around it.
The fence which Troy gradually builds in front of his house serves as a symbol of segregation, as well as the general psychological need to build a fortress where a black ‘inside’ or interior can set itself off from the white-dominated world around it. From one angle, the fence represents the geographical effects of segregation in general: the fencing-off of blacks, the creation of ethnic insularity in certain neighborhoods, and it is a monument to this basic social division effected by white economic and political power. Yet Troy also builds the fence himself; it’s largely his own creation, though Rose initially tasks him with building it. Rose wants the fence in order to set her and her family off from the outside world, to protect a private interior of their experience—lived, black experience—from an outside world threatening to invade it, and from the divisive effects which white power inflicts upon society. While the latter divides with the aim of controlling and limiting black prosperity and influence, the division effected by Troy’s fence is one of protection and an affirmation of the world within it.
Throughout the play, we also see how its characters are forced to define their world in terms of how it’s limited by a racist system of white social and economic power. We see that Troy’s workplace, for instance, is organized according to a racial hierarchy privileging whites, since exclusively white men are hired to drive the company’s garbage trucks, while black men are only hired as garbage collectors. Further, much of the characters’ speech relies on pointing out their status as people of color in order to describe their position in relation to white power.
Wilson’s play therefore, in part, concerns itself with depicting how racism governs and structures the everyday lives of its characters, in order to expose—through the concrete experiences of one family—racism’s many effects on the black American community of the 1950s at large. The meaning behind and need for the fence, and the play’s exposure of a black world in many ways defined by its oppression, are a scathing condemnation of the division and pain inflicted by white power. Fences gives a palpable reality to the abstract mechanisms of racism and white power—it reveals the pain of, as well as the aspirations and opportunities withheld from, its black characters. Through framing pain as being at the heart of almost all its characters’ lives, Wilson reveals the psychological complexity and intensely tiresome and tasking nature of navigating a racist world divided principally between white and black. At the same time, he reveals how that division divides blacks themselves through the pain it inflicts upon them (such as Troy’s conflict with Cory over his desire to play football, since Troy’s parenting is informed by his past experience of discrimination in the world of sports).
Practicality, Idealism, and Race
Fences explores the different views some of its characters have about what’s feasible, achievable, and practical or life-sustaining with regard to career ambitions and future goals. Troy disapproves of the livelihoods to which his sons aspire, considering them to be idealistic dreams compared to what he views as more practical trades. Troy’s disapproval, especially in Cory’s case, is largely informed by his own experience growing up black. Cory’s youth—his experience growing up in a different period of history—however, affords him a broader view of what the future might hold in store for him, of the careers open to him as a young black male. Consequently, he has a different understanding of what qualify as practical, viable ambitions.
Troy doesn’t think Cory should pursue a future in football, since he believes that black people are prohibited from success in the white-dominated world of sports. Troy’s past in the sharecropping South, and his experience as a talented baseball player whose career could never take flight because of discrimination, have all informed his sense of black life and opportunity in the world around him. It’s this background which makes Troy perceive Cory’s ambition as idealistic, and not grounded in reality or practical. Further, while Lyons says music is something essential to life, Troy sees Lyons’ lifestyle as shirking the responsibility and hard work Troy associates with a man’s ‘proper’ profession. Though Lyons says he values being a musician for a value intrinsic to it, Troy thinks only about money, finding Lyons’s ambitions to be impractical. Lyons lifestyle fails to adequately provide for him, but he nonetheless continues to pursue music over a more stable trade.
Does Fences suggest that the idealism of Cory or Lyons is a better choice than Troy’s practicality? While Wilson ultimately writes Troy’s existence off at the end of the play with an aura of failure, dissatisfaction, anger, and betrayal, it might be too simplistic to say that this is a gesture of critique—that Wilson condemns Troy’s practicality altogether. Further, the fact that his sons appear to be more compassionate, level-headed, and hopeful as human beings are not sufficient grounds to say that Wilson favors their idealism over Troy’s practicality. Rather than taking a stance on either, Wilson seems more concerned with showing us how the social world of white power and racism, and how it changes and evolves through time, forms its characters’ perceptions of idealism and practicality—how, to a great extent, especially as disenfranchised black men, Troy and his sons’ perceptions of idealism and practicality are molded by the white power outside and around them.
Troy’s practicality, informed by his sense of failure at the hands of racial discrimination, ultimately leads him to become an embittered man who withholds affection from those around him, and who cannot see past his own horizon when it comes to thinking about his sons’ futures. But Wilson perhaps wants to show us that people like Troy exist because an unjust world has hurt and formed them, and that the pain which racism inflicts on such people gets recycled into the generation they raise. Wilson doesn’t seem to want to delegitimize Troy as a human being by implying that his practicality is something which he personally invented—rather, he wants to educate a white audience, and give a voice to a black audience, about the suffering which exists in people like Troy, why it exists, and how it is passed on.
Similarly, Cory and Lyons are not treated by Wilson as a choice in an ethical decision between idealism versus practicality, but rather as two views of a racially divided world informed by a different, more progressive but still grossly regressive social atmosphere—as the two have different personal pasts than Troy. By pitting Troy against Cory and Lyons, Wilson again shows us how white power not only separates itself from blackness, but also separates and divides blacks themselves. While not picking a side, Wilson positions the play from the standpoint of a more historical perspective about how these sides are formed, and how they shape future generations, at the same time that he grounds that higher perspective in a family’s everyday lived experience.
Manhood and Fathers
The play largely revolves around the turbulent relationship between Troy and his children—particularly his relationship with Cory. Cory’s desire to assert his own manhood and determine his own future clashes with the authority Troy feels as a father. Further, Cory’s ambitions go against everything Troy thinks will be good and healthy for his son’s prosperity.
Cory evolves in the play from cowering in fear of his father to ultimately severing his ties with him in a gesture of ‘masculine’ hubris. While Cory grew up being incredibly passive and submissive to his father out of fear, he gradually starts acting out of his own self-interest (such as his pursuit of football) in his later teens. Troy actively denounces Cory’s attempts to define and pursue his own goals, and believes that Cory is obligated to absolutely bend to his way insofar as Cory lives under his roof. But this eventually pushes Cory to leave home and curse his father’s treatment of him and his mother. Earlier in the play, Troy describes a similar situation with his own father growing up. Troy’s father, while a tough man to live with, looked after his children, according to his account. But Troy, getting into a severe conflict with his father one day, left his father—like his own son—to go out on his own.
Perhaps as a symptom of his own struggles with leading a stable life as an independent man, Troy, in trying to protect Cory from similar struggles, seems to ultimately think that Cory’s desire to make his own decisions fundamentally contradicts their father-son relationship. It’s as if, in order for Cory to become a man—which would inevitably involve assuming independence from his father’s command—he must necessarily be at odds with his father.
Further, Wilson seems to be exposing us to one kind of ‘masculinity,’ one way it is constructed and defined—and how that construction is based in the social world around it as well as in the characters’ personal history. In this case, the masculinity is that of Troy, and can be interpreted as something of an archetype of a certain kind of working black father in the 50s.
This masculinity is defined by having defied one’s father in the past, endured poverty propped-up by a racist society, and failed to follow one’s dreams—but having nonetheless survived, stayed alive, and kept going, despite all the odds. In the eyes of their father, then, Cory and Lyons live comparatively privileged lives having been entirely provided for until they were grown. But, in the eyes of Troy’s sons—especially Cory—this isn’t enough. Cory doesn’t feel loved by his father, and can’t see how his father’s harshness is in anyway symptomatic of something larger than him and beyond his control. The play perhaps shouldn’t be read as siding with Troy’s treatment of his children and his decisions in raising them—rather, it tries to show, once again, how two worldviews clash in the father-son relation.
Wilson doesn’t seem to offer a clean-cut solution to escaping the cycle of misunderstanding, anger, and stuck-in-the-past-ness characteristic of men like Troy and their fathers. He does show, however, how they can have such incredible power in shaping the future of their children—e.g., Cory doesn’t get to go to college—and therefore the future generation. Additionally, Wilson shows how difficult it is to free oneself from such a father without totally severing the relationship.
Ultimately, Wilson’s decision to make the conflict between father and son the central pivot of the play underscores his desire to show how abstract forces of history—particularly white social and economic power—manifest themselves, through their racist exertion on peoples’ lives, in real, concrete, everyday lived black experience. The microscopic, psychological relationship between a father and his son is one of the most intimate venues for those more macroscopic forces, and as such, is very powerful to witness—it’s a venue with an educational power for white audiences.
Family, Duty, and Betrayal
Fences is a portrayal of family life—of how its characters view their roles as individual family members, and how they each define their commitment or duty to the family; it also explores how betrayal can break the familial bond.
Troy refuses to tell Cory he loves him; rather, Troy tells Cory he only acts out of duty towards him as a son, and that there’s no reason that love necessarily must be involved. Duty, for Troy, is the foundation of family—but it’s almost indistinguishable from how Troy views professional duty (as an act one is obligated to perform regardless of one’s personal feelings towards one’s employer—e.g., he speaks of Mr. Rand in this way). If love isn’t a factor that distinguishes family from profession—if family is just a contractual obligation—then Troy must not find much of anything about family life particularly rewarding or unique.
Troy’s affair with Alberta doesn’t conflict with his understanding of family as founded on duty. Troy largely view his obligation and connection to his family as fiscal, and nothing more. Further, Troy’s betrayal of Rose ultimately reveals how the ties of families like his are fundamentally based upon the relationship between the two spouses who create it—in this case, a black man and woman raising a family in relative poverty—and upon whose union, which isn’t guaranteed, the survival of those ties depend. Troy’s betrayal therefore reveals a crack at the heart of family life: the fact that the idea of a family as a stably defined, pre-existing structure of human experience and development is quite complicated. Dishonoring his bond with Rose, Troy’s family starts to fall apart.
Further, the idea of what the Maxson family really ‘is’ gets complicated by the addition of Troy’s baby with Alberta, Raynell, whom Rose lets into the family after Alberta’s death, becoming her adoptive mother. The family, therefore, is revealed to be a system of pledges and vows which, as such, can morph and evolve over time. This sense of pledging is emphasized by Rose’s reply to Troy when he admits to his affair—Rose emphasizes the intense sacrifices she’s made for her relationship with Troy, saying that there were definitely times she wanted to pursue more fun and satisfaction by being with other men, but that she refused because of her vows.
Rose also defends her view of family as essential and unbreakable by insisting that Cory attend his father’s funeral, despite his wish to skip it. While Cory considers himself separated from his father, Rose invokes family as something which should surpass personal differences. Yet, at the same time, this is not an invocation of Troy’s kind of duty. For Rose, family is more than a fiscal contract. She tells Troy she felt a devotion to him based on a moral sacrifice of her own, personal longings—a sacrifice which adultery undoes and betrays. Unlike Troy’s sense of obligation, adultery conflicts with Rose’s sense of moral duty.
Whereas Troy thinks that his adultery is something permissible, and which Rose should be able to accept and wrap her head around because of all the sacrifices he’s made to support the family, Rose rejects this. She affirms that she’s made sacrifices too, but they transcend sacrifices motivated merely by making money and doing one’s job as a provider in getting food on the table and maintaining the house. Rather, Rose’s ‘duty’ is one of staying together and protecting the bonds of the family—bonds which she, again, sees as something never to be broken.
Mortality
The topic of death appears throughout the play in various forms, both in the physical death of two characters (Troy and Alberta), as well as in the stories told by Troy and through his brother Gabriel’s obsession with the Christian afterlife.
Troy mentions the grim reaper (“Mr. Death”) several times throughout the play, telling a story about how they once wrestled. Troy seems to believe that, while death is an unavoidable fate, one should try to go out with a fight. Troy says that he knew Death had the upper hand in their battle, but that he nonetheless wanted to make his death as difficult as possible to achieve. Further, the fence can be read as a barrier to the inevitable onslaught of death. Troy mentions that the fence he builds is a way of keeping Death out of his life.
Gabriel, always thinking about judgment day, has perhaps just as strong an obsession with death as his brother. Gabriel’s obsession, however, is more loud and noticeable because it’s expressed in his manic, psychotic ideas about his supposed spiritual powers. Troy’s obsession with death is perhaps just as strong, however, for in a way it sustains him: Troy’s pride in having survived against all the odds—his father, intense poverty, personal failure—relies on death to fuel itself.
On the day of Troy’s funeral, Gabriel declares that Troy has successfully entered the gates of heaven. While this declaration may not indicate the opinions of other characters, it nonetheless ends the play, and is the final word on Troy’s death. Gabriel’s proclamation therefore has both a punctuality and an ambivalence; the play ends with the gates of heaven opening onto and usurping Troy’s fenced-off existence. Death ends the play by annihilating the in/out distinction effected by a fence, and Troy dies in an unfavorable status because of his adultery.
Wilson therefore seems to speak against Troy’s view of death, and how this view informs his approach to life and the lives around him. If we take Troy to view death as a force that should be fought against at all costs, to the extent that one should give up on taking any risks (such as Cory’s football ambitions, in his mind) and even sacrifice one’s ability to give love and compassion to one’s family members as a result of that fight, then Wilson seems to speak against this.
By having Troy die unsatisfied and in low moral standing, Wilson suggests a couple of things. First, with regard to Troy’s adultery, he did take a risk—but one for himself, and which endangered his family, rather than a risk at least attempting to invest in his family (like letting Cory try out football and attend college, despite his uncertainty about its promise). Troy lets the pressure of death eat at him to such an extent that he seeks to find satisfaction in life (to defy and thwart that pressure) in an extreme form, somewhere outside the space he’s cultivated and fenced off for his family. Secondly, Troy is ultimately unhappy because of this decision to find satisfaction beyond his fence—he ruins his relationship with Rose, and Alberta dies because of the baby with which he impregnated her. This suggests that Troy’s constant struggle to defy death and win out against it—or at least his specific methods of doing so—is something which ultimately fails, and which hurts everyone who’s affected by that failure.
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