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영어

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002, making her the first African-American woman playwright awarded the Pulitzer. This article examines the relevance of African-American history and literary tradition to this play, using some tropes of African-American race theory: W. E. B. Du Bois’s “double-consciousness,” and Henry Louis Gates’s analysis of “signifying monkey” and “tricksterism.” Topdog/Underdog, which has many implicit metaphors and symbols, is a story of tragic homicide involving two black brothers playing a game of 3-Card Monte. As a joke, the brothers, Lincoln and Booth, were ironically named by their father after real historical figures who were enemies in American history. First, I examine the consciousness of the main character, Lincoln, who struggles to escape from the legacies of blackness but fails at last, from the viewpoint of Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” Secondly, I analyze the two brothers’ narrative tactic of “signifying.” It is a theoretical term that refers to a genre of African-American narrative often employing indirect attack against a stronger opponent. Lastly, I point out how prominent the “trickster” theme, a common legacy of African-American literature, is in this play. In Topdog/Underdog, the 3-Card Monte, as a primary metaphor of this play, symbolically alludes to the trickster tradition of African- American history and literature. The tragedy of this play lies in the fact that both the brothers, inevitably, can not avoid their history, their black legacy. Parks once said that her task as a playwright is to show us forgotten African-American history on the stage. She always exhibits an awareness of African- American history in writing plays, wants to show the relevance to it, and does it in this play.