The Palm-Wine Drinkard
A rich man's son who does nothing all day but drink palm-wine loses the tapster who kept him supplied, and walks off to Deads' Town to fetch him back from among the dead. The road runs through a market where a complete gentleman is assembled out of hired body parts, past a child born from a swollen thumb, and into the country of creatures who charge their tolls in flesh. Written in a Yoruba-inflected English that Dylan Thomas praised on publication and Nigerian critics at first deplored, it works from the oral folktale and from Fagunwa's Yoruba-language forest romances.
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Lineage
- influenced by ↑ The Forest of a Thousand Daemons
- ↓ The Famished Road
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Hero's Journey (Campbell)
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Mode / tone
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 69% · 18 shared
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- 42% · 11 shared