Representation of Individual Will as the Agent of Social Transformation in Wole Soyinka’s Novels

Abstract

This study focuses on representation of individual will as the vehicle of social transformation in Wole Soyinka’s novels. The Interpreters and Season of Anomy constitute the study population and the main sources of primary data for this study. The primacy of individual will in social transformation is an integral philosophy in Soyinka’s literary writings. Viewing social reconstruction as a recurrent process; the study employs dialectical materialism, a brand of Marxism, which forms a vantage theoretical prism. This study demonstrates that the two novels represent Soyinka’s fictionalisation of attempts to realign social constructs and the strength of individual characters reigns in this quest. Soyinka invests enormous artistic energy in the lone, individual character and he bequeaths this loner the exclusive preserve of galvanising society and steering it towards reconstruction. The communal aspirations and energies for the revolutionary transformation of the patterns of social and cultural production are bestowed on the larger-than-life hero.