27 pages • 54 minutes read
August WilsonJoe Turner's Come and Gone
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Shiny Man
The shiny man is the “One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way” and appears to Bynum in a mystical vision (15). The vision starts when Bynum meets a man on the road who offers to show him the meaning of life. Bynum is looking to see the shiny man again, this time to affirm his identity and know that he has “left his mark on life” (15). At the end of the play, after freeing himself from the weight of his past, Loomis becomes the shiny man, “having found his song, the song of self-sufficiency” and Bynum’s search is complete (86).
Song
Song is the metaphor for identity as established in Bynum’s vision of the “shiny man” who leads him to the “Binding Song” and his purpose in life. Everyone has their own song, and they need to find it on their own. Loomis lost his way because he forgot his song in the trauma of being kidnapped by Joe Turner. He regains his identity at the end of the play when he finds his song again.
Joe Turner
Joe Turner represents the legacy of slavery as well as the continuing oppression of African-Americans by white men in the Jim Crow South. The effect of Joe Turner’s imprisonment of Loomis is a microcosm of the history of slavery and its devastating impact on the African-American experience: an innocent man is kidnapped, forced into labor, robbed of his spirit, and his family ripped apart.
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By August Wilson
