The majority of The Emperor Jones is written in a sequence of hallucinatory flashbacks. As Jones runs through the forest in the hopes of escaping Lem’s murderous uprising, he encounters multiple visions and memories that escalate in thematic intensity.
Beginning with the vague and nebulous "Little Formless Fears" in Scene 2, Jones is at first only haunted by representations of his own past. His encounters with Jeff, the Prison Guard, and the Black convicts in Scenes 3 and 4 are direct callbacks to the rumors of his past that he and Smithers discuss at the beginning of the play. As Jones reenacts his fateful encounters with these figures, he begins to lose his sense of time and place, falling deeper into a spiritual reconnection with his humanity and his origins. By Scene 5, the line between Jones’s actual memories and the collective past of enslaved Black people is explicitly blurred with the appearance of the Auctioneer and the Planter, as well as by Jones’s hallucination of the slave ship. This nonlinear narrative structure allows O’Neill to present the audience with a glimpse of Jones’s deeply troubled psychological state while also making a commentary on race, colonialism, and imperialism in the U.S. and abroad.
The longer Jones spends in the forest (and the deeper he confronts his intergenerational trauma), the more he is able to recognize the lineages that connect the past to his present, as he does in the quote below from Scene 7:
What—what is I doin'? What is—dis place? Seems like—seems like I know dat tree—an’ dem stones—an’ de river. I remember—seems like I been heah befo’.
While on a literal level, Jones’s journey through the forest has caused him to travel in circles, on a more spiritual plane, Jones has reverted from a godlike figure to a man. What matters is not whether Jones has actually lived through each of these flashbacks, but rather that these visions speak to the shared history of oppression and its lasting impact.
