Black Boy Essay
Analyse the process through which Richard becomes independent and highlight your observations through judicious textual references which capture the power of Wright's narrative style.
This novel focuses on the struggle for identity of a young black boy in the Deep South. It is a powerful testament of his life. In this novel, Wright uses writing to free himself from the prejudice he is constantly facing, gradually he find that writing allows him to explore new ideas and expand his imagination, not only this, but Wright discovers through self realisation that he faces a need to write in order to break out from the constraining world of race, religion and family.
Throughout his life, Richard faces the need for a loving family to help and encourage him, but his family in a way, unknowingly help to form his independence. Throughout his youth, he faces the need to be independent, for instance regarding his negligent father who appears to despise Richard. Richard's father even decides to abandon the family after he has an affair with another woman in order to live with her and form a new family. When the parents are facing each other in court over financial issues, Richard expects his father to be humble, perhaps even ashamed but his father acts confidently and wins the approval of the court. 'It had been painful to watch my mother crying and my father laughing.'' The mother was in a state of emotional turmoil, yet the father still did not support her. Richard's father is a pathetic example to Richard of a man who has responded to the struggle of being black by drinking and womanizing. Richard's mother on the other hand, could be considered a much better role model for him. She forces him to fight back when he feels people are being unjust towards him, she teaches him to be a fighter, for instance, when he is beaten and the grocery shopping money is continuously taken from him, his mother simply reacts by giving him a stick and telling him If these boys bother you, then fight.'' She tries to make him tough and independent because she feels that this is the only way he can survive.
Richard is often disciplined through the church and religion through his grandmother and his mother. At moments he is very close to being pulled-in by religion. 'While listening to the vivid language of the sermons I was pulled towards emotional belief, but as soon as I went out of the church and saw the bright sunshine and felt the throbbing life of the people in the streets I knew that none of it was true and that nothing would happen.
Little Brown Baby by Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence Dunbar is one of the most influential African American poets to gain a nationwide reputation. Dunbar the son of two former slaves; was born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio. His work is truly one of a kind, known for its rich, colorful language, encompassed by the use of dialect, a conversational tune, and a brilliant rhetorical structure. The style of Dunbar’s poetry includes two distinct voices; the standard English of the classical poet and the evocative dialect of the turn of the century black community in America. His works include
Narrative is a form of writing used by writers to convey their experiences to an audience. James Baldwin is a renowned author for bringing his experience to literature. He grew up Harlem in the 1940’s and 1950’s, a crucial point in history for America due to the escalading conflict between people of different races marked by the race riots of Harlem and Detroit. This environment that Baldwin grew up in inspires and influences him to write the narrative “Notes of a Native Son,” which is based on his experience with racism and the Jim-Crow Laws. The narrative is about his father and his influence on Baldwin’s life, which he analyzes and compares to his own experiences. When Baldwin comes into contact with the harshness of America, he realizes the problems and conflicts he runs into are the same his father faced, and that they will have the same affect on him as they did his father.
Richard fails in finding manhood to emulate in his father. In the beginning of the book Richard’s father leaves his mother for another woman, making life for Richard’s family even more so difficult. “ After all, my hate for my father was not so great and urgent as my hate for the orphan home,” says Richard. When his father left, Richard and his brother were put into an orphan home, in order for their mother to work. When Richard, his mother, and his brother go to try to get money from Richard’s father, all he offers is a nickel to Richard which Richard refuses. Richard said that many years after, the picture of his father and the other woman by the fire, “ would surge up in my imagination so vivid and strong that I felt I could reach out and touch it.” Richard was unable to find manhood to emulate through his father.
“Who am I?” (Thomas 415). Many ask themselves this relevant question in times of self-doubt or ambivalence. Leona Thomas asks this question in her essay entitled, “Black and White.” As the child of a black father and a white mother, Thomas finds herself in a racial dilemma. Society punishes Thomas for being “mixed.” Through the use of the literary techniques of pathos, logos, and inductive reasoning, Thomas effectively persuades the reader that society should look beyond one’s mixture. She shows that racial orientation should not determine how a person is perceived by society, and that the people in society should stop being racist to one another.
Richard is defining himself as a black boy in the Jim Crow South, but he is also open to the ideas and separate interpretations to further his knowledge on what exactly that means for him. Richard’s writing reflects his experiences, direct or indirect, like Bigger with his incarceration, and himself on discovering true segregation and unequal rights. The theme of Black Boy is paradoxical because is it unknown as to whether he will ever discover the secrets behind becoming a black man, and not only a black man, but a black man who had grown in the middle of the entire dispute. The book share violence but in the most informative way; without the violence the true South would not have been expressed in the novel, and as a reader you could not grasp his emotions on the topics he presents on himself like how he had suffered but his suffrage was caused by his own mothers suffrage and so on. A man is not born a slave, but a man is made a slave. Richard had become a slave to society in trying to do all things right, but also trying to flee the South and head North as if the South has still been a branch of slavery and
Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” confronts a young black person’s forced maturation at the hands of unsympathetic whites. Through his almost at times first person descriptions, Wright makes Big Boy a hero to us. Big Boy hovers between boyhood and adulthood throughout the story, and his innocence is lost just in time for him to survive. Singled out for being larger than his friends, he is the last to stand, withstanding bouts with white men, a snake, and a dog, as we are forced to confront the different levels of nature and its inherent violence.
Within the course of two decades these three novels deal with racism, diversity of people and similar economic status. The writers raise awareness of the oppression of the African American communities and the long lasting struggles that these folks had to endure to survive.
The reader is first introduced to the idea of Douglass’s formation of identity outside the constraints of slavery before he or she even begins reading the narrative. By viewing the title page and reading the words “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself” the reader sees the advancement Douglass made from a dependent slave to an independent author (Stone 134). As a slave, he was forbidden a voice with which he might speak out against slavery. Furthermore, the traditional roles of slavery would have had him uneducated—unable to read and incapable of writing. However, by examining the full meaning of the title page, the reader is introduced to Douglass’s refusal to adhere to the slave role of uneducated and voiceless. Thus, even before reading the work, the reader knows that Douglass will show “how a slave was made a man” through “speaking out—the symbolic act of self-definition” (Stone 135).
Examination into the true heart of experience and meaning, Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage looks at the structures of identity and the total transformation of the self. The novel talks about the hidden assumptions of human and literary identity and brings to view the real problems of these assumptions through different ideas of allusion and appropriation. As the novel tells Rutherford Calhoun’s transformation of un-awareness allows him to cross “the sea of suffering” (209) making him forget who he really is. The novel brings forth the roots of human “being” and the true complications and troubles of African American experiences. Stuck between posed questions of identity, the abstract body is able to provide important insight into the methods and meanings in Middle Passage.
Throughout Black Boy, Wright explores what it means to be an African American individual living in the Southern and Northern United States during the early 20th century. Because of his inherent strength and his stubborn unwillingness to conform to the expectations of the many, he struggles to find his place within his society. However, Wright’s struggles are not limited to those against the Whites while living in the South. An uneasy feeling of conflict pervades the book, and it becomes evident that his conflicts arise not only from his society’s rejection of his skin color, but from his community’s rejection of his character. In his autobiography, Wright defines himself as a fighter in an unending battle for acceptance—not just as a disenfranchised
The language Richard uses every time the father appears in the story is always negative. In the beginning of the story, he starts about the father’s appearance saying, “His father in his dirty, roughed-up denim, of all days to come home, mud and ash, machete on the hip and the snake pistol, timber boots laced with wire that wouldn't burn, the blackened shanks of ankles, the boot soles cracked by heat and desperate shoveling, his father footprinting crazy mazes of topography across the clean wooden floors.” All of the adjectives used are harsh. This allows for the audience to feel that he is a rough and tough sort of man, the kind of man that you do not want to upset, not out of respect but out of fear. Using these choice words, the author immediately turns readers off by the father and leads them to believe that he will certainly show no mercy toward the boy if he disobeys the
The novel Black Boy was Richard Wright’s way of telling his own story about life from when he moved to Chicago at the age of nineteen. There are difficulties with his white colleagues and involuntary social isolation.
The main character is completely alienated from the world around him. He is a black man living in a white world, a man who was born in the South but is now living in the North, and his only form of companionship is his dying wife, Laura, whom he is desperate to save. He is unable to work since he has no birth certificate—no official identity. Without a job he is unable to make his mark in the world, and if his wife dies, not only would he lose his lover but also any evidence that he ever existed. As the story progresses he loses his own awareness of his identity—“somehow he had forgotten his own name.” The author emphasizes the main character’s mistreatment in life by white society during a vivid recollection of an event in his childhood when he was chased by a train filled with “white people laughing as he ran screaming,” a hallucination which was triggered by his exploration of the “old scars” on his body. This connection between alienation and oppression highlight Ellison’s central idea.
Father and Son by Bernard McLaverty 'Father and Son' by Bernard McLaverty is a short story which is set in
A main theme in this novel is the influence of family relationships in the quest for individual identity. Our family or lack thereof, as children, ultimately influences the way we feel as adults, about ourselves and about others. The effects on us mold our personalities and as a result influence our identities. This story shows us the efforts of struggling black families who transmit patterns and problems that have a negative impact on their family relationships. These patterns continue to go unresolved and are eventually inherited by their children who will also accept this way of life as this vicious circle continues.