The Gods Must Be Angry: Flight to Canada as Political History
This discussion of Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada has dual aims, for in it I seek to discuss the novel as literature1 and as social commentary. The literary discussion is an analysis of point of view and time (discussed here as a function of plot) as they impact on character development. The social commentary is derived from the literary analysis: point of view and time cause Reed's characters to illuminate reactionary and progressive aspects of Afro-American political history. The following quotation from the novel's first chapter provides a useful way to frame this analysis, for it contains the nucleus of the conflicts that animate the novel: