ABSTRACT
Arnold Wesker has demonstrated an interest in the development of individuals, in his early works, in the dilemmas that they face as they attempt to interact in meaningful ways with other individuals. His socialism has always been more about exploring how individuals can work through those dilemmas to form meaningful relationships than it has about shifts in economic paradigms. In particular, Wesker says of the most successful play of the Trilogy, Roots, that it deals with socialism as personal contact. Roots is the story of one person's, and specifically Beatie Bryants, ineffectual attempts to work through the problems of being human to develop socialistic personal contact. This chapter analyzes how and why Beatie attempts to bring about these relationships, to demonstrate how Beatie's moment of transcendent self-realization at the end of Roots makes plausible the possibility that these relationships might still develop.
