Derek Walcott Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert Elliot Fox

Critical Essay by Robert Elliot Fox

SOURCE: "Big Night Music: Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain and the 'Splendours of Imagination'," in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XVII, No. 1, 1982, pp. 16-27.

In the essay below, Fox traces the theme of dreams and the imagination in Dream on Monkey Mountain.

—Dream. Ona nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. Of a wonday I shall wake.

[James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake]

In Derek Walcott's own words, "The play is a dream, one that exists as much in the given minds of its principal characters as in that of its writer, and as such, it is illogical, derivative, and contradictory. Its source is metaphor …" ["A Note on Production," in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays, 1970]. This statement is crucial to any profound understanding of the work [Dream on Monkey Mountain], and my purpose in this essay shall be...
(read more)