Bakkos, who is alone amongst the Olympians for his youth along the ancient. In Frenzy, Percival Everett’s adaptation of The Bacchae, pains are taken to emphasize how singular Dionysos is. He is the youngest of the primary twelve Greek gods, and perhaps would have been mortal had he not been re-birthed by Zeus. Dionysos is the only god, and one of the rare myths in which a child is born from a male figure. Even Athena was born from Zeus’s mind, she was never carried within a body, and she never had another parent. Dionysos, therefore is alone in this aspect, being the only Olympian to be twice-born. Everett takes pains in Frenzy to highlight each of the qualities that separate Dionysos from the other Greek gods, and this theme of isolation is one theme that persisted throughout the works of Everett that we’ve read for class.
Starting with a look into Frenzy, almost every character seems to exist alone. Besides Dionysos, who, in Everett’s version of The Bacchae, is a combination of god and mortal, Everett went out of his way to create a character to feel things for the young god. Vlepo, like his master, is isolated on behalf of the nature of his being. Throughout the story, there is much question into exactly what he is, and the bounds of his existence, that is, whether he is capable of human things. As the story closes, he comes to cease his questioning, and almost accept that he will never be like anyone, or anything that he sees. When once he felt love for Sibyl, in one of their final conversations, he is turned bitter and daring, and after she calls him a bitter man, he replies almost without hesitation ‘If a man I am’. Another time, as Bakkos requests him to bring the spirits along that may be Semele, Vlepo comments ‘and we all, god, shade, and whatever I was, filed out of that chamber…’. These quotes seem to identify his conceding to the wretched fate he has been given, and the shift of his mental state makes him cruel. His growing spite and cruelty only distance him more from the world, until neither he, nor Dionysos can tolerate the loneliness they feel.
Everett’s Frenzy concludes with Vlepo killing his master, bothar an act of independent will, and of compliance. In Everett’s variation of the Greek myth, he decides to make Dionysos the only of the Olympians able to sleep, and makes this a grand plot point as bystanders such as Tiresias watch him and ask if the half-god knows the danger of what he is doing, as Dionysos is also the only god that can die. As it happens, the wine god was aware of what his quest for sleep might lead to, as he asked of Vlepo, ‘After I have achieved sleep, real sleep, I want you to cut out my heart from this body and leave it unceremoniously on the ground.’ and proceeded to hand Vlepo the exact knife to do the deed. Everett’s Dionysos was a melancholy man, as aware of his mortality as he was of his immortality should no one kill him. Dionysos could not bring himself to care about anything after his own discovery that time would eventually make everything meaningless. At one point, after Vlepo accuses him of wasting time with such Bacchic revels, the god responds “‘A waste of time?” he questioned, ‘But there is so much time. Do you know what I mean, Vlepo?” he asked, sadly. “There is just so much of it.’”. Dionysos cannot deal with an immortality of separation and distance, he couldn’t relate to anything, or anyone around him, and thus he couldn’t live with any of it. Separated from the world of mortals with the story of his birth, his parentage, and his powers over men, yet separated from the world of gods by his youth and mortality, Dionysos couldn’t tolerate his distance from the world.Separated from the world of mortals with the story of his birth, his parentage, and his powers over men, yet separated from the world of gods by his youth and mortality, Not Sidney Poitier did not understand how to approach his distance from the world. Throughout Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier, the protagonist begins his life distanced from others. Born of a hysterical pregnancy to a mother all believed to be insane, with no father in sight, and a name that confused most of his potential playmates into what he describes as ‘always receiving beatings from boys with whom I wished to play.’ Not learns to fesmerize purely to make it stop. He is distanced also from reality, through his life frequently slipping into the plot of a Sidney Poitier film, taking hold of him sometimes for months at a time, as in his experience in the South, getting arrested for being black, spending time in jail, and falling into the sequence of The Defiant Ones. Not Sidney’s life is anything but ordinary, and it is nothing that anyone else can relate to. Rather than death as a means to cope with the direction that his life has veered, Not Sidney, by the end of the novel, seems to become Sidney Poitier. This is an almost death that eradicates the confusion of calling someone ‘Not Sidney Poitier’, almost as if he is deciding that, rather than continuing to distance himself from the world, he would rather settle for being someone that he isn’t. Because for him, that falsehood sounds better than isolation.