In Richard Wright’s non-fiction novel Black Boy the main character, Richard, faces many problems that he must deal with. In this book the author writes about his life and hardships. The book starts off with Richard at the young age of four. Black Boy represents the deprivation Wright faces growing up. It shows poverty, hunger, lack of emotional support, miserable living conditions and Richard’s response to these difficulties.
Education and acquiring knowledge was a problem that Richard faced in the course of his life and which he emphasized heavily in this book. He was a very curios boy that wanted to learn. He would look at the books of the kids in the neighborhood and ask them what the black print was. He would also question his mother until finally she sat down with him and they read together and he would ask about words. He was enrolled into school but since they were constantly moving he never went one year without his schooling have been broken. At one point his teacher read to him from her novels and his grandmother scorned her and said that was the devils work. This didn’t stop him. He would read novels and not even know enough words for what he was reading to make sense. His quest for literacy was one that he had to deal with alone. He didn’t have much support from his family but he would not give up on furthering his education.
The black white issue didn’t affect Richard until later in his life when he started to acknowledge there was such an issue. He wanted to be accepted into society and wanted to change the ways people treated the blacks of the south. He wanted to be equal with the whites and felt that knowledge would bring him closer to them and understand them and how they think.
Richard’s hatred towards his father posed a problem in his earlier life. He felt that his father was a stranger to him since he worked at night and slept during the daytime. He noticed his father’s personality when they were living in a two-room apartment. Richard and his brother had to remain quiet while his father was sleeping. Richard had a tendency to rebel against parental authority. One day him and his brother were playing with a kitten that lingered around the house and their father woke up and told them to either kill the cat or make it leave from the area.
Richard Wright grew up in a bitterly racist America. In his autobiography Black Boy, he reveals his personal experience with the potency of language. Wright delineates the efficacious role language plays in forming one’s identity and social acceptance through an ingenious use of various rhetorical strategies.
In his autobiographical work, Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote about his battles with hunger, abuse, and racism in the south during the early 1900's. Wright was a gifted author with a passion for writing that refused to be squelched, even when he was a young boy. To convey his attitude toward the importance of language as a key to identity and social acceptance, Wright used rhetorical techniques such as rhetorical appeals and diction.
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
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.” (Richard Wright) In 1945 an intelligent black boy named Richard Wright made the brave decision to write and publish an autobiography illustrating the struggles, trials, and tribulations of being a Negro in the Jim Crow South. Ever since Wright wrote about his life in Black Boy many African American writers have been influenced by Wright to do the same. Wright found the motivation and inspiration to write Black Boy through the relationships he had with his family and friends, the influence of folk art and famous authors of the early 1900s, and mistreatment of blacks in the South and uncomfortable racial barriers.
... 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.
in Richard Wright's Black Boy: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Stepto, Robert. "Literacy and Ascent: Black Boy." Appiah, 226-254. Thaddeus, Janice.
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.
Black Boy is a denunciation of racism and his conservative, austere family. As a child growing up in the South, Richard Wright faced constant pressure to submit to white authority, as well as to his family’s violence. However, even from an early age, Richard had a spirit of rebellion. His refusal of punishments earned him harder beatings. Had he been weaker amidst the racist South, he would not have succeeded as a writer.
His journey then began and he lived the life of a black man. It is with such bravery that he went and risked becoming a Negro. He knew that adverse consequences would occur once people knew the truth. He did not care; I was fascinated with his desire to see what stood between both races, not minding what others would think.... ...
Another topic that in interesting to discuss is why this white boy was forced to live in such poor conditions. Dalton Conley stated in the book that despite his mother and fathers economic standings, his family was able to maintain a livable lifestyle where many neighbors and friends at that time could not of enjoyed. His family could have moved to a more up scale, refined community, but simply couldn't afford it.
THESIS → In the memoir Black Boy by Richard Wright, he depicts the notion of how conforming to society’s standards one to survive within a community, but will not bring freedom nor content.
When Richard first got into school he realized reading was one of the main activities in school, so he knew he would be doing a lot of reading throughout school. This was a problem for him, because he had a fear of reading and it didn’t help that as child Richard 's parents only read books to gain knowledge about something such as manuals and newspapers he never saw them "read for pleasure". (Rodriguez pg.227) As school went on he was placed in a remedial class with a nun as the teacher. She helped him to get over his fear of reading alone and this gave him the will to read more and more books.
Published in 1945, Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy was to prove the contrary. It documented prejudice and oppression caused by the Jim Crow laws in the Deep South in the early twentieth century. It is an account of the difficult road of an African American, who was convinced to have greater destiny than that of a stereotypical black person, the white people tried to transform him into.