Exam Focus

Wole Soyinka's A Shuttle in the Crypt contemplates a critical period in Nigerian history between 1966 and early 1971. Soyinka's efforts to curtail the Nigerian Civil War in 1967 resulted in his arrest and imprisonment without trial by the federal military government. Soyinka's work remains inseparable from his activities as a political dissident. His commitment to promoting human rights in Nigeria and other nations reflects his new approach to literature as a serious agent of social change. A Shuttle in the Crypt chronicles Soyinka's twenty-five month experience of solitary confinement with its accompanying horrors and dangers. His poems typify the renewed political concern of the African writer as a critic of societies which promote human degradation. The four archetypes; 'Joseph," "Hamlet," and "Ulysses," and ‘Gulliver’, are "travelers," like Gulliver who have been at one time or another physically (Joseph and Ulysses), or mentally (Hamlet) imprisoned or trapped. As one might expect, all four poems work cross-referentially with their original counterparts: "Joseph" with the Old Testament Book of Genesis; "Hamlet" with Shakespeare's play; "Ulysses" with both Homer's epic and James Joyce's novel; and "Gulliver" with Part One of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, "A Voyage to Lilliput." These archetypes draw an analogy between Soyinka and the corresponding character from literature. In "Ulysses," Soyinka employs a first-person monologue that serves as the personal voice of the poet. In this fashion, Soyinka steps away from the Modernist (and sometimes Victorian) use of dramatic monologue in poetry, a technique which often produces a narrator who cannot be trusted to deliver the poet's meaning in his own words. By means of these allusions to the archetype of Ulysses, Soyinka presents isolation as a major theme of the poem. To show the concern of the poem being a personal experience of the barb or poet the use of first-person monologue is justified just like he