Comparitive Speech on Fences

Comparitive Speech on Fences

In the immortal words of Holden Caulfield the play Fences was filled with a bunch of phonies. Is phoniness genetic? That is a question we’re confronted with. How could one generation that sees so much phoniness in their fathers continue to exhibit this same phoniness? Before I can properly access this situation, you may find yourself asking who am I to determine whether someone else is phony? Well I’ll tell you who, like most of you I’m a high school English student whose job at the moment is to critique other people’s work. By doing this assignment, yea I am conforming to society’s demands so maybe I am a phony. But wouldn’t that make me even more qualified to judge the phoniness Holden so much despises and the Maxson family embodies. It takes a phony to know a phony so therefore I can proudly say that I am a phony if it will, in fact, increase my credibility to judge these characters.
Now, I looked at the characters in both novels and began to compare them. Holden was a phony and yet he judged others and deemed them to be phonies without ever realizing he was no better than them. Troy and his sons both unconsciously labeled their fathers phonies without ever realizing their own status as a phony. The correlation here is somewhat unsurprising; they’re all men. Now this is purely speculation here but it appears to me that men in general are unable to recognize their own faults. They are quick to judge yet slow to understand. Why is it that Rose can recognize her own faults and accept responsibility for her mistakes yet the men cannot do the same. This book does address the issue of feminism but not in the sense that I am considering it. These men are savage beasts in the way they deal with their problems but Rose is calm, she’s smart, quick-witted, her words are sharp, concise but all the same more powerful than one of Troy’s tirades could ever be.
We see a clear example of the ineffectiveness of a man’s approach in the conflict between Cory and Troy. Troy uses...