Struggle for Social Justice: A Study of The Novels of Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka is known primarily as a playwright. His vision is described variously as, “inspirational”, “transcendental”, and “demanding but rewarding”. He is also a poet and a literary critic as well as a novelist. Season of Anomy (1973) is only his second novel; his first, The Interpreters (1965), examines the lives of intellectuals in Nigeria immediately after independence. The novel is confounded with expectations and betrayals both because it is so far the only other novel “proper” that Soyinka has written and more importantly compared with The Interpreters (1965), his second novel which was a huge disappointment, so much so that for many critics, it seriously undermined the Nigerian dramatist’s stature as a novelist.(Palmer 1979) Their newly acquired independence causes them in a state of aimlessness, still unsure of themselves and their roles in the new society but on the verge of commitment. Season of Anomy (1973) and The Man Died (1972) are the two prose works in Soyinka’s tetralogy on the Nigerian Civil war which creates set of characters who take a commitment to transform society. Similarly the other two titles in this quartet are the volume of poems collected in the A Shuttle in the Crypt (1971) and Madmen and Specialists (1970), the greatest allegorical drama.