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The above title, with its alliterative rhythm, came to me upon realizing, once again, that fiction unerringly replicates the human experience. Too often, our lives are disrupted when mischievous forces lead to indefinable mental and emotional anguish; we are, on occasion, temporarily "maddened" by these forces, particularly when they may set into motion a series of chaotic events, or what may commonly be referred to as mayhem.
Writers of fiction, who are attuned to these actualities of the human condition, often re-create these actualities by condensing the same characteristics of more lengthy narrative prose, such as the novel, into a compact art form called the short story.
Three writers who have made noteworthy contributions to the body of works we call "African-American," Charles Chesnutt, Ann Petry, and Alice Walker, illustrate in selected works that mischief, madness, and mayhem are woven with keen precision into the lives of pivotal characters. The stories titled "The Doll," by Charles Chesnutt, "The Witness," by Ann Petry, and "The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff," by Alice Walker, may be analyzed in an attempt to show how the aforementioned trio follows a literary domino principle. The chosen writers, each coming from a different generation in African- American literary history, provide a changed backdrop, while revealing practically identical themes of our struggles with racism, classism, and sexism, to name some.
Writing during an era called "Post Bellum-Pre Harlem," Charles Chesnutt is arguably the progenitor of crossover appeal in African- American short fiction. Although the
Zeitgeist of the late 19 and early 20 centuries was racially hostile, Chesnutt's short story "The Doll" appeared in 1912 in Crisis magazine. In brief, the story tells of an Afri can- American barber named Tom Taylor, located in the fictional Groveland, (Ohio) whose father's murderer is seated in his chair, boasting about having killed the father some years earlier in the South. Through a series of lengthy interior monologues, readers learn that Tom Taylor's vengeful instincts nearly drive him to slit the throat of Colonel Forsyth, the southern bigot seated in his chair. Chesnutt's third-person narrator relates a vivid scene:
How often he had longed for this hour! In his dreams he had killed this man a hundred times, in a dozen ways. Once, when a young...