Slaughter Beneath The Bridge

Different touch of literary genre has been observed in Okri’s writing including aspects of life within Nigeria and in the World at large. Although these stories are speckled yet a common theme is threading the magical reality in all stories. For example; in the story 'Laughter Beneath the Bridge', the Biafran war is being told according to the viewpoint of a ten year old boy. If it had never occurred to you that wars could also shake the emotive life of younger children then read this short piece. Children and women had most often being cited as the victims of war but the emphasis has mostly been placed on their geographical and psychological dislocation. However, this short piece tells how the ten-year old boy lost a girl to whom he loves, …show more content…
While The Landscapes Within did denote a noticeable development on his first novel, Okri was conscious that he needed to develop a new form of writing that was capable of supporting the weight of his Nigerian experiences, now viewed from London.
The other side of Okri’s work shows a deep understanding with the phrase ‘magical realism’, which was first introduced by Franz Roh, a German art critic. According to him it was a way of representing and responding to reality and pictorially depicting the enigmas of reality.
In canonizing Okri’s most celebrated work and a major standout of the African canon, according to the West, The Famished Road along with short stories like Laughter Beneath the Bridge, Converging City, Disparities, Incidents at the Shrine, The Dream-vendor’s August and A Hidden History have endured all sorts of tags: fabulist, magical realist, experimental, modernist, postmodernist, avant-garde. This is to say it is different even by the most different standards. Because all these are demanding to read, structurally firm in its non-linearity, persistently cyclical, devoutly episodic and always challenging of logical narrative arcs and conventional literary