Ruthless Capitalism and Alienation and in Ben Okri’s Stars of the New Curfew

Abstract

Capitalism, Alienation and lamentation have been thematized in a plethora of African novels. However, Ben Okri has succinctly depicted the themes via careful characterization and narrative technique. That is, the themes of lamentation and alienation have been woven into the tapestry of the narrative such that a dichotomization and evaluation of the aforementioned themes amounts to the explication of the author’s worldview and narrative technique. To this end, this paper explicates the concepts of alienation and lamentation and their manifestation in Okri’s Stars of a New Curfew and concludes that Okri explicitly depicts the chaotic landscape and mindscape of the world of his short story and has graphically portrayed the decay and squalor which characterized life in Lagos in the 80s.Using the tenets of critical realism in the interpretation of the text, it is concluded that the writer succeeds in adumbrating the ills ravaging the slums of Lagos and Nigeria but fails to proffer lasting panacea to the conundrum.
Alienation, lamentation, capitalism, critical realism.