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[I]t is nearly impossible to avoid one reading of Fences as a deliberate point-to-point signifyin(g) parody of Death of a Salesman.
-Mark Rocha
The artistic ancestry of Fences is at least as much Euro-American as African, for the play's blues sensibilities (themselves an American invention) are figured in a text which displays its creator's obvious mastery of conventional Euro-American theatrical structure, pace, and methodology. Furthermore, its narrative events, particularly its exploration of family dynamics, appear-at least to me-intended self-consciously to recall, in particular, Arthur Miller's classic mid-twentieth century American drama, Death of a Salesman.
-Michael Awkward
Although August Wilson claimed never to have read Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and did not count Miller as a playwriting influence, his play Fences contains a number of similarities to Arthur Miller's classic play,2 as critics Mark Rocha and Michael Awkward note above. In an attempt to explain the uncanny parallels between the two plays, both Rocha and Awkward interpret Wilson's statement that he has not read Death of a Salesman figuratively rather than literally. While Awkward suggests that Fences's resemblance to Miller's play is deliberate and intentional, Rocha explains the resemblance in terms of "signifying"-a form of black vernacular speech, or more specifically "facing," which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defines as "that by which you intend to confine (or define) me I shall return to you squarely in your face" (qtd in Rocha 5). Thus, Rocha suggests that Wilson is "repeat[ing] and revis[ing] the work of literary antecedents, which in Wilson's case means 'getting in the face' of the American triumvirate of O'Neill, Miller, and Williams" (5). As Sandra G. Shannon interprets Rocha's explanation, Fences "can be understood as an effort to place the African American experience on the same ground as that occupied by the more dominant culture. . . . Fences makes a strong case for elevating the African-American experience to a grand scale and for erasing the so-called color line long enough to make Troy Maxson's misfortune and pain more than simply one black man's predicament" (85). Like Shannon, Rocha, and Awkward, my discussion of how the American dream impacts the father-son conflict in Fences and Death of a Salesman points out the way in which Wilson "riffs" Miller's play, and seeks to...