My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Amos Tutuola
- First Published: 1954
- Type of Work: Psychological symbolism
- Time of Work: The mid-twentieth century
- Setting: Nigeria
- Principal Characters: The Narrator, The narrator’s Brother, The narrator’s dead Cousin, The Smelling Ghost, The Chief Ancestor, The Flash-eyed Mother, The Super Lady, The King of the Fourth Town of Ghosts, The Television-handed Ghostess
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Family or family life, Africa or Africans, Magic or magicians, Power, personal or social, Love or romance, Twentieth century, Religion, Ghosts or apparitions, Fear, Good and evil, Fantasy, Imagination, Hunger
- Locales: Nigeria
The Novel
Except for his entry into the Bush of Ghosts at the beginning and his return to the human world at the end, what happens to the narrator of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts seems haphazard. This impression results from the fact that the story shares with oral storytelling and with dreams a sequence of events controlled by feelings rather than logic. The narrator, for example, passes through various towns in the Bush of Ghosts, but the numbers attached to them give no clue to the order in which they are encountered, for he comes to the seventh town first and the...
[The entire page is 1774 words long]

