deaths of the two lovers apparently induced. Despite
the role of fortuity in the tragic outcome, the more
defining accountability rests in the human agents
themselves. To this effect, the plague, seemingly
fortuitous, precisely symbolizes the feud’s moral
rottenness.
In all these works, with the exception of The
Aeneid, fate presents divine agency as muted, pas-
sively present, or altogether absent in the affairs
of human beings. The emphasis, rather, is that
events emerge through deliberate human action, not
through chance. Such a conception prefigures the
20th-century philosophy of existentialism, which
affirms a human being’s freedom to act and account-
ability for choices made, despite the nihilism to
which random, meaningless, absurd events may lend
themselves.
Suzan-Lori Parks’s 21st-century Pulitzer Prize–
winning play Topdog/Underdog further explores the
themes of fate and free will through the experi-
ence of two African-American brothers struggling
to get by and get ahead, the tragicomic absurdity
of their underclass existence deftly balanced with
the burdens placed by mythology and history on
their autonomy. Their father, in a whim, named
the brothers Lincoln and Booth, foreshadowing
the antagonism that will plague their interactions
within their instinctive alliance to assist each other
in the plight of the African-American man: dearth
of opportunity. Thus, they wrestle in the age-old
struggle of Cain and Abel, representing the eternal
clash between the topdog and underdog as both
individuals and subgroups of society. Lincoln (Link)
emancipates himself from his former lucrative but
dangerous life as a three-card monte hustler and
instead, ludicrously, becomes a black impersonator
of Lincoln in an amusement park game, whereby
he gets repeatedly “assassinated” by all the Booths
in the world who have an “axe tuh grind” (46). Like
President Lincoln, who single-handedly freed the
slaves, Link tries to free his younger brother from
the enthrallment of three-card monte—unsuccess-
fully because, like his namesake, he cannot offer
Booth viable opportunities of gainful employment.
His efforts to protect Booth only appear as actions
of a rival and inexorably lead the two into a fatal
face-off in the three-card monte. Again, as with all
the works previously discussed, in Topdog/Underdog
it is individual action based on characteristic dis-
position, induced by the psychological, emotional,
and economic urgencies of the dramatic moment,
that bring Lincoln and Booth to the self-fulfilling
prophecy presaged by fate, myth, and history.
See also Bellow, Saul: adventures oF auGie
March, the; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “Rime
of the Ancient Mariner, The”; Conrad, Joseph:
Lord JiM; Dickens, Charles: taLe oF two cities,
a; Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan: hound oF the
baskerviLLes, the; Dreiser, Theodore: aMeri-
can traGedy, an; Edwards, Jonathan: “Sinners
in the Hands of an Angry God”; Erdrich,
Louise: binGo paLace, the; Flaubert, Gustave:
MadaMe bovary; García Márquez, Gabriel:
one hundred years oF soLitude; Harte, Bret:
“Outcasts of Poker Flats, The”; Homer: iLiad,
the; Lowry, Lois: Giver, the; McCarthy, Cor-
mac: aLL the pretty horses; Naipaul, V. S.:
bend in the river, a; Shakespeare, William:
tweLFth niGht; Tolkien, J. R. R.: Lord oF the
rinGs, the; Wilde, Oscar: iMportance oF beinG
earnest, the.FURTHER READING
May, Rollo. Freedom and Destiny. New York: Norton,
1981.
Parks, Suzan-Lori. Topdog/Underdog. New York: Dra-
matist’s Play Service, 2004.
Unhae Langisfreedom
Close observers can see that, rather than standing
still, the Statue of Liberty steps forward over broken
shackles, representing how freedom progresses, its
very definition changing over time. In the medi-
eval worldview, freedom meant acting according to
reason, and it focused on the discussion of free will.
However, the modern definition of freedom primar-
ily focuses on political and civil freedoms, having
little to do with reason. This differentiation between
medieval and modern conceptions of freedom fol-
lows the English philosopher John Locke’s 17th-
century divide between liberty and license. In his
Second Treatise of Government (1690), Locke writes,
“The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it,freedom 35