Both brothers were abandoned by their parents and have depended on each other for survival since they were teens. Link, the older of the two brothers, was a master of Three-Card Monte.
Topdog/Underdog by Suzan-Lori Parks: Summary, Themes & Analysis
Three-Card Monte is a card game usually used by confidence men to trick players into betting on whether they could identify a target card from three possible card choices. Link retired from the con after a friend was killed during a game. He found honest work at a carnival, ironically, impersonating Abraham Lincoln. People would pay to walk up behind him and shoot him.
Topdog/Underdog Introduction
Although Booth is the younger brother, he is highly opinionated and has followed in his brother's footsteps as a con man. He is working toward being the best Three-Card Monte player ever. He is also a petty thief who steals from area stores. The first half of the play focuses on Booth, who is trying to convince Link to leave his job at the carnival and get back to hustling Three-Card Monte. Booth thinks that since Link is a better card player than he is, they can work together to make even more money.
We learn that Booth was recently kicked out by his ex-wife Cookie, and is living with his brother. His life consists of hustling and enjoying a life of pleasure while reminiscing about his childhood. Link doesn't like his brother's laziness or career path. This disconnect is the cause for the majority of their conflict. Most of what Booth wants for the future is tied to getting Link away from the carnival and back in the card game.
The major issues seem to come to a head and reach resolution in the second half of the play. Booth gets stood up by a woman that he has been seeing and gets hustled by his brother Link. All of these things seem to push him over the edge, and in a rage, Booth kills them both at the end of the play. Although both Link and Booth are African-American, they are named after an assassinated US President who brought an end to slavery, and his assassin. The naming of the characters and the fact that Link, who portrays President Lincoln, is killed over and over again, speaks to how Lincoln's work is 'murdered' almost daily through racial issues that still surface in this country.
The play also focuses on a post-race society. In one scene, Link and Booth remember their father's tirade against 'the white man', particularly an instance when he even blamed white men for the tires on his car going flat that day. What their father didn't know was that Link and Booth had put nails under all of his tires. The use of this story demonstrates that some of the supposed oppression that people experience is deeply rooted in paranoia. Themes of class or power come into play, because in many life situations one brother is viewed as the topdog and the other as the underdog.
In this case, because he has a job, a place to live, and a seemingly better life, Link has the power and is therefore the topdog. The final major theme is greed.
Both brothers made money at one time or another hustling people with a card game, the premise of which is simple greed. They trick people into thinking they can win more so that the brothers themselves can get more. And in the end, it's greed that causes Booth to kill his brother. Even though he loses his inheritance in a game of Three-Card Monte with his brother and claims to be defending his 'stuff,' it's this greed that causes him to lose what is really his most prized possession, his brother.
Parks shows in this scene that greed's ultimate reward is ending up with nothing at all. The show focuses on two brothers named for a former President, Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes-Booth, and their tumultuous relationship. The play is a tug-o-war that focuses on themes of race, class, and greed, this shown through several different lenses throughout the play, such as the brothers both handling the same occupation at different times of the con-game Three Card Monte or the boys' father pressing his own form of racism despite there being no evidence supporting his claims.
In the end, one of the brothers murders the other and ultimately ends up with nothing. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.
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