In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, you see not only the transformation of a young boy going into adulthood, but a fascinating story of a hero on a journey to discover his true identity and his part in society. “Heroism is not about rising to the top, fighting for one's rightful place in society, but rather about making one's society and one's self whole. There is, however, also the notion that the right person can solve even global problems single-handedly. If the right person attempts such a feat, it will usually be successful” (Haberkorn). Wright goes from an ordinary world of struggles with hunger and poverty to a life of unfair treatment due to the color of his skin. This only leads Wright to take on the world with his head held high and ready to outstand anything that comes his way. His challenges makes him the activists he is meant to be and to defend his belief of how society should really be; equal and fair for everyone of any race. In his story Black Boy, Richard Wright goes through a series of obstacles on his hero journey to self-knowledge and ends up learning more about him self and society then he ever bargains for.
Wright grows up surrounded in extreme poverty and oppression where he sometimes has to go to bed without anything in his stomach. This childhood experience prepares him to face any struggle life could throw at him outside of his ordinary world of hunger and lack of life’s necessities. “My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set the emotiona...
... middle of paper ...
...h. Richard Wright, as a hero, fights against society to make it out of extreme poverty and into a place in society where he can give back and help educate and enlighten those like him who struggle to get on their feet and progress due to discrimination and other obstacles that Wright also faces.
Works Cited
Lawson, Gerard. "The hero's journey as a developmental metaphor in counseling." Journal of Humanistic Counseling, Education and Development Fall 2005: 134+. Academic OneFile. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
Haberkorn, Gideon. "Cultural palimpsests: Terry Pratchett's new fantasy heroes." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 19.3 (2008): 319+. Academic OneFile. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
Osland, Joyce Sautters. "Working abroad: a hero's adventure." Training & Development Nov. 1995: 47+. Academic OneFile. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.
One well-known example of “The Hero’s Journey” from popular culture is the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling. In the novel, Harry Potter, the main character, is the chosen one and “The Hero’s Journey” applies to his life from the moment he is attacked by He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named as a baby. Joseph Campbell calls the initial phase of a hero’s development the “Call to Adventure.” The call is the in... ...
The transition of being a black man in a time just after slavery was a hard one. A black man had to prove himself at the same time had to come to terms with the fact that he would never amount to much in a white dominated country. Some young black men did actually make it but it was a long and bitter road. Most young men fell into the same trappings as the narrator’s brother. Times were hard and most young boys growing up in Harlem were swept off their feet by the onslaught of change. For American blacks in the middle of the twentieth century, racism is another of the dark forces of destruction and meaninglessness which must be endured. Beauty, joy, triumph, security, suffering, and sorrow are all creations of community, especially of family and family-like groups. They are temporary havens from the world''s trouble, and they are also the meanings of human life.
In Black Boy blacks were treated as less than humans. The whites wanted to be superior in every way and they forced the blacks to follow their rules. In one of the jobs that he had, Wright witnesses how awful his boss treated a customer because she did not pay. “They got out and half dragged and half kicked the woman into the store…later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying, holding her stomach her clothing torn.” (Wright, 179) Whites treating blacks like this was normal. When the woman was being mistreated there were whites around, but they did not even look at them because they did not care. There was also a policeman who arrested the woman after she was assaulted Wright was mistreated in many ways because he was black and did not know how to give in to the rules. Because of the way society treated him, Wright became angry and with that anger grew a motivation to become better. He wanted to change the destiny that the whites had set for all blacks. In Separate Pasts McLaurin grew up in the South with blacks around him since he was a child. While there was still segregation in his city, blacks and whites still lived together better than with Wright. McLaurin recalls how he spent so much time with blacks and to him it was normal. “From the fall I entered the seventh grade until I left for college…every working day I talked and
...ng dwelled in because he was an useless African American in the eyes of the racist, white men. Little did he know that this decision he made in order to run away from poverty would become the impetus to his success as a writer later on in life. In Wright’s autobiography, his sense of hunger derived from poverty represents both the injustice African Americans had to face back then, and also what overcoming that hunger means to his own kind.
First, Wright’s prevalent hunger is for knowledge. This hunger sets him apart from those around him, which drives the path created by their differences further between them. Nevertheless, it gives Wright’s life significance and direction.
Out of bitterness and rage caused by centuries of oppression at the hands of the white population, there has evolved in the African-American community, a strong tradition of protest literature. Several authors have gained prominence for delivering fierce messages of racial inequality through literature that is compelling, efficacious and articulate. One of the most notable authors in this classification of literature is Richard Wright, author of several pieces including his most celebrated novel, Native Son, and his autobiography, Black Boy.
A stunning realization for Richard Wright in his autobiography Black Boy was the multifaceted uses of language; his words could offend, console, enrage, or be a fatal weapon. In Wright’s unceasing quest for knowledge, he discovers a strange world that makes him feel that he had “overlooked something terribly important in life.” He conveys his amazement at the literary realm through his metaphorical language and curiosity depicting his point of view.
... middle of paper ... ... Richard Wright, hero to the black American, was one of the first men to fight for equality among blacks and whites. In his writings, Richard expresses to white people what kind of hardships all young negroes go through and how this lifestyle affects their behavior.
Black Boy, which was written by Richard Wright, is an autobiography of his upbringing and of all of the trouble he encountered while growing up. Black Boy is full of drama that will sometimes make the reader laugh and other times make the reader cry. Black Boy is most known for its appeals to emotions, which will keep the reader on the edge of his/her seat. In Black Boy Richard talks about his social acceptance and identity and how it affected him. In Black Boy, Richard’s diction showed his social acceptance and his imagery showed his identity.
Richard Wright was born September 4, 1908 on a plantation just outside Natchez, Mississippi. A grandson of slaves, he was raised solely by his mother after his father left the family when Wright was only five years old. His mother was religious and a schoolteacher, whereas his father was an illiterate sharecropper. The father abandoned the family to become a traveling worker. The family began to drift apart (Taylor). With never enough food in the house and his mother becoming ill in 1915, Wright was sent to a Methodist orphanage where he was beaten severely for various infractions. He later ran away from there and was sent to live with his grandmother. She was a Seventh-Day Adventist who later gave up trying to force Wright to go to church. Starting late because of the lack of nice clothes for him to wear, he was schooled in Jackson, Mississippi, but he never graduated from high school. He was a very strong reader and had a gift with words. His childhood in the rural South, after being abused mentally and physically by racis...
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.
Another thing he was trying to do with this book is to show people that black street leaders can become local heroes. Even though they might have started out as street fighters, they can change their life to become a political group and work towards changing the system that they feel will never accept them for the people that they really are. In this book the author shows you a way to build this nation’s communities that are very much under resourced. It also lets you know that there are things that we can do to change a bad situation, as long as we are willing to work towards making a change and there also must be resources available to help make that change. In other words, “where there’s a will, there’s a
In The Negro’s Friend, Claude McKay makes readers visualize the true meaning of salvation and segregation. African Americans were fighting to end segregation, but McKay spoke and said that they were wasting their precious time. McKay wanted African Americans to know that the state was under control by the white supremacy. He said that their cries were useless and didn’t help anything.
The sympathetic humanist might bristle at first, but would eventually concur. For it's hard to argue with poverty. At the time the novel was published (1912), America held very few opportunities for the Negro population. Some of the more successful black men, men with money and street savvy, were often porters for the railroads. In other words the best a young black man might hope for was a position serving whites on trains. Our protagonist--while not adverse to hard work, as evidenced by his cigar rolling apprenticeship in Jacksonville--is an artist and a scholar. His ambitions are immense considering the situation. And thanks to his fair skinned complexion, he is able to realize many, if not all, of them.
Oppression is something we 've all witnessed. But how does oppression really affects individuality, community, and society? Evidently, certain members of oppressed groups continue to struggle for equality and opportunity, particularly during times of when money is tight. More specifically, the borders of races and ethnicities touch economic opportunity, political representation, as well as income and social mobility of people of color. However, there are factors of what influences people to become an oppressor or oppressed, or to have even slight racial views. In Richard Wright’s case in his autobiographical novel, Black Boy, Wright had been raised in Pre-Civil Rights America, where oppression is present and prevalent in the South, as well