The fear which pervades LeRoi Jones's work is that of a loss of identity—a fear which becomes socially relevant when extended to the scale of racial assimilation. In this context violence functions … as a means of discovering and forging identity…. [Jones's] is a sensitivity, created by the extremes of racial guilt and discrimination, which can see no middle ground between man as victim and man as rebel…. While the violence which emerges as the strongest mark of Jones's work does at times show something of the ambivalence which Brecht had felt, there is an element of unabashed relish in its presentation, particularly in The Slave and The Toilet, which constantly threatens to undermine its validity both as drama and polemic. (p. 140)

LeRoi Jones's fierce commitment is such that he has felt himself bound, at times, to attack those who have apparently transcended the immediate concerns of racial injustice…. 'A writer' he insists, 'is committed to what is real, and not to the sanctity of his Feelings.' While this is a distinction which Kafka or Lawrence, for example, could not have felt to be a real one it is indicative of Jones's refusal to accept a humanistic interpretation of the racial situation. What is real is the economic and political history of the Negro; what is fanciful is the belief that racial friction is a moral failure which can be corrected by individual soulsearching…. [While] he has actively supported Civil Rights Jones's plays boast a simple objective, for, unlike Baldwin, his vision is not of a unified society but rather of a world in which the present order is inverted. In this context his attraction to violence becomes little more than an aspect of revenge while his plays are dedicated less to urging a humanistic commitment than a revolutionary separatism. (pp. 141-42)

Jones's insistence on the irrevocability of history, expressed in the bitter poem which had followed Kennedy's death ["Exaugeral Address" is in Dutchman] clearly demonstrated in racial terms…. [His] play challenges the whole proposition of integration. The question which he is asking is, 'integration into what?' Western rationalism, 'the great intellectual legacy of the white man', has in his eyes led merely to the rationalisation of repression and violence. (p. 146)

[The Slave] is described by Jones as a fable. As such it represents his attempt to circumvent what Pirandello, Artaud and Beckett had seen as the fundamental flaw of the theatre—the arbitrary and imprecise nature of language…. [Yet Jones] does not dispense with language or transform it into a ritualised sub-structure of intonation and timbre but relies, like Gelber and Albee, on what he calls a 'metalanguage'—the tangental communication of the parable. The parable which he presents here is an apocalyptic vision seen in purely racial terms. The Slave is in essence an extension of the conflict of Dutchman to what Jones clearly sees as its logical conclusion. 'Discovering racially the funds of the universe. Discovering the last image of the thing. As the sky when the moon is broken.' (pp. 147-48)

Despite a further indulgence in his particular forte for a gratuitous violence inflicted on his white characters The Slave does progress considerably beyond the oversimplifications of Dutchman. For when Walker Vessels, who in the main body of the play is the leader of a Negro revolt, delivers a prologue dressed as a field-slave, he condemns that which 'passes as whatever thing we feel is too righteous to question, too deeply felt to deny' as 'a deadly filth' …—a considerable advance over the dogmatic assumptions of Dutchman. For in that play … he was content to destroy one cliché but to replace it with another. If he attacked the deep-rooted association between black and evil he did so only to recall that the curse of corruption and death derived from a white Eve. Here, however, he is not merely concerned with the injustice of the racial situation but, ostensibly at least, also with that intellectual slavery which is an aspect of blind dogmatism…. For all his calls for objectivity, however, the sheer force of his commitment and even his hatred once again takes possession of his drama and the play fails to realise the potential suggested in the prologue. (pp. 148-49)

Walker himself is the realisation of that potential which had been embodied in the person of Clay, in Dutchman. He is no longer a poet, as Clay had been, for in the place of poetry he had discovered the 'sanity' of violence. He shuns both the egocentricity of the artist and the self-justification of the social critic…. While Jones's contempt for docile assimilation is complete he does show here an ambivalence in his attitude which he would claim stems directly from the nature of the Negro's dilemma. Walker cannot remain neutral yet he admits to dissatisfaction with a solution which is in essence merely an inversion of the problem. (p. 150)

Jones's plays … are, at base, revenge fantasies—public rites of purgation in which the audience is invited to participate. (p. 151)

The alienation of Jones's rebel is in essence spurious. Far from dissociating himself from the corruptions of the dominant society his aim is to join it on his own terms. The change which he would force on that society is not a moral but purely a structural one. Slavery remains intact except that its victim is of a different pigmentation. Where once it had been the black woman who had been violated by the white man and who, in time, had her children taken from her now, in The Slave, the situation is reversed. (p. 152)

In the terms of both of his major plays his approbation is reserved for those who remain actively aware of historical truths and the need for racial pride; alert alike to the facts of oppression and the need to maintain a separate culture and identity. Language becomes a sign of membership in this group—a gesture of rejection as powerful but ultimately as self-defeating as the jargon of a fading Beat movement. Nor are these personal biases always entirely integrated into the body of his play. His casual dismissal of all those outside of the inner circle of committed savants is less a significant aspect of either Clay's or Lula's character for example than of Jones's own prejudices…. It is clear that the language and indeed the plays themselves are seen as a weapon. They represent a declaration of disaffiliation…. Yet with their rigid categorisation, their justification of the stereotype they represent a blunt weapon and an unconvincing declaration. (p. 153)

[The] subject of Dutchman and The Slave is less the actual plight of the Negro, about which we learn practically nothing, than the difficulties and dilemmas of the Negro writer. The poet, the social critic and the Negro activist are at war with one another. For while on the one hand he demands a literature of commitment, vigorously declaring itself, on the other hand he says that a poem 'can be made out of any feeling' and that a poet—someone, that is, with a 'tempered sensibility'—should be able to write about anything at all and make it into 'something really beautiful'. This same duality is observable in his own work and while the plays, as we have seen, tend to be savagely tied to the Negro/white conflict, his poems frequently attain to an objectivity and universality denied his drama.

In common with most didactic writers Jones is something of an artistic pragmatist. The value of an idea or individual life is governed, he writes, by the extent to which it can be said to be 'specific and useful'. From this it follows that value and effectiveness tend to be associated in his mind and emotional response becomes confused with intellectual assent. Thus while his disturbing revenge fantasies provoke a predictably ecstatic response from Negro audiences it is far from clear if this is indicative of their clear perception of his meaning or rather of their conscious participation in a public purgative rite.

Despite the obsessions which continue to undermine the value of his work LeRoi Jones is one of the few Negro playwrights who has shown an interest in and an understanding of the nature and problems of drama itself…. While LeRoi Jones is in no sense an innovator, however, he does demonstrate a mastery of dramatic technique which reveals a genuine potentiality. The technique which he uses is essentially that employed by Albee and before him by Durrenmatt and Brecht. The 'metalanguage' which is his attempt to transcend the barrier between individual perception and artistic intention is his endeavour to express something 'not included here'…. Resting in myth and structured on the parable, as is Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Durrenmatt's The Visit … and Albee's The Zoo Story, his plays, and especially Dutchman, attempt to communicate through metaphor and hyperbole. Yet it is precisely his failure to communicate which ironically constitutes the greatest weakness of his work…. Jones's is a talent lacking in discipline and controlled by a desperate commitment yet he is clearly aware of the real potentialities of the theatre. For if Dutchman lacks both the depth and control of Albee's The Zoo Story it does reveal an understanding not only of dramatic technique but also of the need for the modern theatre to examine the roots of its own power. (pp. 154-55)