The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Essay Topics

Important Quotes

Symbols & Motifs

Decay, Detritus, and Bodily Waste

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has a consistent focus on the unsavory, scatological details of everyday life in Ghana. The book begins with an encounter between the man and a bus driver, who kicks him off the bus when he discovers the man has drooled all over the bus seat—the same driver spits a gob of mucus and hits the man walking in the street.

During the man’s journey from home to his work and back, he is constantly forced to interact with mold, rotting wood, dirty and greasy walls, repulsively dirty bathrooms, and human bodily waste. Even when he is at home, he notices the thick growth on the floor of his bathroom.

The scatological details are emphasized also in the body of Koomson after the overthrow of Nkrumah’s government. The man and Oyo are physically repulsed by the rotten, sickly odor coming from his body, which the man says is due to his fear of being arrested. This represents Koomson’s inner “rot,” or his corruption and greed, rising to the surface to be seen. Throughout the book, the characters are forced to deal with the unsavory, dirty aspects of ordinary life. It is impossible to remain perfectly clean, just as it is impossible to remain untouched by the deceit and corruption of the government. Internal and external filth both work to make the lives of ordinary citizens almost unbearably soiled.

The Bus

The novel begins and ends with the bus, which “moved uncertainly down the road” (1) and was “held together by too much rust ever to fall completely apart” (1). The bus is a symbol of the uncertainty, impotency, confusion, and ineptitude of the government in post-independence Ghana. The bus also figures as a site of corruption—the bus driver in the beginning of the book reminisces on short-changing a wealthy customer, and a bus driver at the end of the novel bribes a policeman, indicating that little has changed following the ouster of Koomson and his cronies.

At the end of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the bus figures as a momentary source of hope. When the man sees the titular inscription on the bus driving away, he looks at the illustration of a flower and thinks that perhaps someday things will change, and Ghana will become different. While this hope lasts only until he starts his walk home, it is an important moment for the protagonist of the novel.

Water

The only moments in the book where the character feels a “freedom from dirt” (23) is when he stops to look at water. This occurs when he takes a lunchtime walk out of his office and stops to look at a stream flowing from underneath a railway trestle bridge. Then at the end of the book, when he wakes up alone on the beach, he sees the sun’s rays “coming very clean and clear on the water; and the sky above all open and beautiful” (180). These moments of cleanliness and tranquility come few and far between for the protagonist.

Additionally, the man thinks about his friends Kofi Billy and Sister Maanan, with whom he smoked wee by the seawater. These memories are tinged with sadness, as he reflects on Kofi Billy’s suicide and the nature of wee as something that reveals too much about the nature of reality, and thus drives people to desperation and grief.

Another important water-related moment in the book is Koomson’s escape from Ghana after the overthrow of Nkrumah’s government—he is eventually able to flee to safety on the boat which Oyo’s signature has made it possible for him to illegally own.