Adversity In Fences

“Fences” is a play written by August Wilson about a family living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1957. Troy and Rose have been married for 18 years and have two grown children; Lyons and Corey. Troy is an uptight, prideful man who always claims that he does not fear death, the rest of his family is more laxed and more content with their lives than Troy is. As the play progresses the audience learns more about Troy’s checkered past with sharecropping, his lack of education and the time he spent in prison. The audience also learns more about Troy’s love for baseball and the dreams he lost due to racism and segregation. In the middle of the play the author outwardly confirms what the audience has been suspecting; Troy isn’t exactly satisfied with his life. He feels that he does not get to enjoy his life and that his family is nothing more than a responsibility. Getting caught up in this feelings, Troy cheats on Rose with a woman named Alberta and fathers a child with the mistress. By the end of the play Troy loses both of the women and in 1965, finally gets the meeting with death that he had been calling for throughout the play. Over the

course of his life Troy faces many institutional barriers, but the two barriers that affected his life the most were his lack of education and his lost dreams of playing professional baseball. These were the most significant barriers in his life because although they first appeared early on in his life they never went away, and they constantly reminded him of the things he could not achieve in life.
Troy has never had an easy life. He ran away from home at the age of 14, with no reading or writing skills and no knowledge of how to live on his own. With few basic skills and racism weighing down on Troy, his options were very limited. Troy’s lack of education made it so he could not find a job or a place to live for a long time. Later in his life, his lack of education still put strain on him. He accidentally sent his brother Gabe to a Mental Institution because he could not read the papers he was signing. It is obvious that this barrier bothers Troy because when Rose brings it up his tone gets angry as he says “I told you I ain’t signed nothing woman! The only thing I signed was a release form. Hell, I can’t read, I don’t know what they had on that paper! I ain’t signed nothing about sending Gabe away”.
Troy’s other major barrier was the dreams he was never able to realize.

As a result of Troy being unable to find a place to live or a job he started stealing to get by. Eventually the situation escalated and he murdered someone in a robbery gone wrong; this led to him being sentenced to 15 years in prison. Prison is where he found his love for baseball. He became quite good with a bat and hoped that when he got out he could play professionally. Unfortunately due to the segregation of the MLB Troy was never able to pursue that career and he is resentful of the situation his whole life.This caused him to be a very bitter person for the remainder of his life and this also caused him to shoot down the hopes and dreams of his son Corey by telling him things like “...The white man ain’t gonna let you go nowhere with that football

anyway.”
Troy's major fences in his life were due mostly to institutional racism and segregation. He struggled in his life because of the lack of opportunities he was given. He was given very few opportunities because of the life he was born into. Troy’s lack of education and resentment over his broken dreams proved to be two of the major fences in his life. However, even though Troy made many mistakes in his life, he did love his family and his life was a successful one. Despite his barriers like not being able to read and write, and the dreams he lost as a baseball player due to segregation; he was still able to get a promotion in his job, and his children grew up to be respectable adults. By the end of the play the author has succeeded in using Troy’s life as an example of how despite life's toughest personal and institutional fences it is still possible to live a good, successful and happy life.