Both Frenzy and I Am Not Sidney Poitier contain elements of Aristotelian tragedy. However, Percival Everett subverts the fated tragic endings for both Dionysos and Not Sidney, as neither of their destinies are suitable consequences for their actions. While Dionysos, a god, is able to escape his τύχη, or the set course of one’s life that is determined by the gods, he does not fully carry the weight of his actions. Not Sidney, on the other hand, only feigns hubris, yet is punished in a way that is a burden to the audience rather than being a catharsis.
Elizabeth Roos makes the claim that Dionysos is a tragic hero because “what they had been dreading for the protagonist finally occurred,” making “Frenzy’s conclusion…arguably more satisfying than I Am Not Sidney Poitier’s” (Roos). Roo posits that because the reader understands that Dionysos would, unlike the other gods, die, Dionysos’ death is an example of Chekhov’s Gun, “satisf[ying] an expectation that has been developed, hopefully creating catharsis in the reader” (Roos).
The reader is aware that Dionysos, unlike other gods, will die (Everett 9), so his death could be seen as a foreshadowed culmination of the chaos he causes. However, his fate as a god is to suffer with his godly actions, and eventually die before being placed back in his body. Dionysos lives his entire life at once, and it is a life of humans experiencing cruel fates due to their passions and his influence. He understands portions of his life through Vlepo, who functions as not only his eyes, but “his mortal bookmark” (Everett 3). Vlepo is forced to process events such as the death of Dionysos’ mother (Everett 16). Vlepo, rather than Dionysos, experiences the brunt of the pain associated with Dionysos, being subjected to the emotional consequences of the god’s involvement in people’s lives (Everett 17). On the contrary, Dionysos is curious about the impact he has, but throughout the novel, he allows Vlepo to experience the frenzy of humanity for him. He consistently avoids responsibility: even when “the notion of violence seemed new and unexpected to him” (Everett 135) he has already committed murder and claims to have been purified by Mother Rhea (Everett 134).
Dionysos sleeps so that he may be closer to his Bacchae, and he temporarily achieves this goal (Everett 83). As he learns how to sleep as a human would, he begins to understand the passions that he has created in humans. This shift from curiosity to a human degree of caring culminates in Dionysos when he rescues his mother from the underworld, a journey paralleling that of Orpheus and Eurydice. He decides that “after [he]…achieve[s] sleep, real sleep, [he wants Vlepo] to cut out [his] heart…and leave it unceremoniously on the ground” (Everett 154). His death is not tragic, but is instead a reprieve from his life. In doing so, Vlepo causes his life to end in a human way, but it ends instead of being placed into a new body.
Dionysos differentiates between letting someone die and killing them (Everett 130), which absolves him of responsibility and indicates that while he allowed himself to die, Vlepo was the one who killed him. Dionysos’ death ends the traumatizing experience of being human, which he now accepts as a human experience. Although this decision ends the chaos, Dionysos does not kill himself. Instead, he lets Vlepo kill him, giving Vlepo the agency and responsibility to end the chaos. Vlepo takes responsibility for Dionysos’ actions, sparing Dionysos both from experiencing emotional pain and from experiencing the struggle of an endless, recursive life where he must play the same roles despite having changed. The reader therefore does not experience the catharsis associated with Aristotelian tragedy.
The audience does not experience catharsis from I Am Not Sidney Poitier because they, rather than Not Sidney, create his fate. Not Sidney does not have hamartia (Murfin, Ray 186), or errors in judgement. He makes decisions based on how he is “[his] own person, so I…believed” (Everett 45), which prompts him to leave the school where his resemblance to Sidney Poitier was used by Miss Hancock as a justification for raping him (Everett 30). Instead, completely nonsensical events shape him into Sidney Poitier, making him the object, not the subject, of his life. He sees a body which he identifies as himself, which makes him Sidney Poitier through double negation (Everett 212). He is Sidney Poitier through structural and cosmic irony (Murfin, Ray 219). The audience knows that he will become Sidney Poitier because he is associated with this non-fictional public figure. Because Sidney Poitier is non-fictional, and is the “generic reference point for all black actors,”, a character named “Not Sidney Poitier” would automatically be associated with Sidney Poitier the actor before he could even demonstrate his personality to the society that forced him to take on the role of Sidney Poitier. The audience and its preconceptions therefore create the tragic structure of the novel: it is built between the non-fictional world of distant celebrity and the personal realm of the individual. The fictionalized versions of real people are echoes of the real world, and are caricatured as a response to how the world views them. Ted Turner speaking in non-sequiturs is an allusion to his influence outside the novel: he is perceived as being the thing which he is associated with, television and the white noise it produces. Jane Fonda is little more than a sex symbol in I Am Not Sidney Poitier, as society has conflated the entirety of her “self” with that aspect of herself. In a similar vein, Not Sidney is conflated with Sidney Poitier by the audience that sees them as similar in physique and race, which causes Not Sidney, who initially did not fit into his role, to be used by the arbitrary plot points to the end of becoming Sidney Poitier. The audience does not receive catharsis from I Am Not Sidney Poitier because they are among the forces that caused Not Sidney’s life to end by being absorbed into Sidney Poitier’s existence.
Dionysos and Not Sidney Poitier are not tragic heroes for opposing reasons. Dionysos is not a tragic hero because he shirks his responsibilities, choosing to be killed as a human instead of suffering with his godly destiny. In contrast Not Sidney takes on the burdens from our society, and loses his humanity despite his choice to be an individual.