Ti-Jean and His Brothers Essay Questions

How does Walcott’s use of folkloric storytelling devices help him develop the themes of Ti-Jean and His Brothers? Use one specific example from the text.

Walcott begins the play with a conversation between animals, who introduce the story of Ti-Jean. The inclusion of talking animals is a popular element of many folklore traditions. In this play, animals are characters within the story, but their conversation also forms a frame around the story. The continuity between the animals who help Ti-Jean win, and the animals who later remember his deeds, allows Walcott to develop the relationship between mortality and the continuing life of nature, both important themes in the play. Within the story, the animals are mortal creatures like Ti-Jean: they share in his knowledge of death and suffering. However, as narrators, they also transcend the span of a human life. Individual birds, crickets, and fireflies die, but the sounds of bird- and cricket-song continues forever, carried on by different individuals. In this way, non-human animals embody the paradoxical coexistence of death and immortality that characterizes life on earth, and that is such an important idea in Ti-Jean and His Brothers.

Identify one example of personification allegory in Ti-Jean and His Brothers. What themes does it allow Walcott to develop?

Throughout Ti-Jean and His Brothers, characters operate both as individual persons, and as representations of abstract ideas. The character of Gros Jean is an especially explicit example of this dynamic. The brother’s first name, “Gros,” is the French word for “large.” Like personification allegories in medieval morality plays and later allegorical literature, his name stands in for what he represents. Gros Jean represents human strength, a strength specifically rooted in his large and powerful body. Reading Gros Jean as an allegory, we see that human strength is brave and capable, but that it eventually gets worn out, and dies. This suggests that strength is not enough to save humanity from death.

Walcott depicts the Devil as a person who wears many masks. What does this suggest about the character of the Devil in the play?

Throughout the play, the Devil almost always appears to the human characters while wearing one of two masks: either the old man or the planter. Mother cautions her sons that the Devil can appear in many guises, suggesting that these two masks are not the only two forms the Devil can take, but only the two forms Walcott chooses to use in this play. These specific forms are important: the old man emphasizes the danger of relying on mortal wisdom, while the planter stresses the evil of the colonial system. However, the Devil's capacity to change forms also suggests, more broadly, that evil can appear in many forms. This, in turn, suggests that to live a good life, one must be constantly vigilant about the possibility of encountering evil. However, Walcott also complicates this idea by portraying the Devil, unmasked, when he appears on stage alone. The idea of the Devil coming in many guises reduces evil to an abstraction, and the character of the Devil to a two-dimensional embodiment of cunning and cruelty. In contrast, the unmasked Devil is a three-dimensional character with complex desires and a tragic personal history. By the end of the play, this is the Devil’s most important trait, because his desire for emotion leads him to spare Ti-Jean after Mother’s death makes the Devil cry. Ultimately, Walcott suggests that the world is not simply divided between good and evil. The challenge of life is not only to be good, but to reckon with problems like suffering and morality whose significance extends beyond morality.

Compare and contrast Mi-Jean and Ti-Jean’s ideas of knowledge.

Mi-Jean embodies worldly, scholarly knowledge. His intelligence relies on his knowledge of complex and technical books that provide encyclopedic accounts of the world and all that is in it. These books pretend to be objective. However, Walcott emphasizes that this kind of knowledge has its own limitations. In Mi-Jean’s meeting with the Old Man, he sees that the man has a goat’s foot, and attempts to reference his book. The book can tell him about all of the individual things he wants to know, but it cannot help him to make connections between feet, goats, disguises, and the Devil. In contrast, Ti-Jean’s knowledge is all about making unexpected connections. When he meets the old man, he is able to deduce his identity from his characteristics, even though the old man has concealed his tell-tale foot. This capacity to make connections is echoed in the way Ti-Jean learns. He listens to his mother and to the animals, relying on his personal connections with them to learn about the world. Ultimately, the contrast between Ti-Jean and Mi-Jean suggests that how we learn cannot be extricated from what we learn.

Identify one theme in Ti-Jean and His Brothers, and explain how Walcott develops it. Use at least one quotation from the text to defend your argument.

One important theme in Ti-Jean and His Brothers is the idea that work is not just an action, but a value. Gros Jean suggests this theme when he says to the planter, “Chief, why you don't take a rest too somewhat? You have all this land, all this big house and so forth, people working for you as if is ants self, but is only work, work, work in your mind, ent you has enough?” By saying “it is only work…in your mind,” Gros Jean stresses that work isn’t just something the planter does, but something he thinks about. The planter’s obsession with work prevents him from enjoying the fruits of his wealth, because all he cares about is work for its own sake. This alludes to the idea of the “Protestant work ethic,” one of the values that European colonizers imposed on the peoples they colonized. Exemplified in axioms like “idle hands are the Devil’s tools,” this idea suggests that work is inherently good. It was used to justify forcing native peoples and enslaved Africans to work. When the planter forces all three brothers to do pointless and extremely labor-intensive tasks, he is implicitly drawing on this same idea; it’s better to do a pointless task than to do nothing at all. Ti-Jean turns this ideology on its head by openly embracing idleness.