Comparing the Innocent Criminal in Black Boy, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and Outsider

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The Innocent Criminal in Black Boy, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and The Outsider

"It is probably a mere accident that I never killed," Richard Wright commented offhandedly in an interview with Robert Moss (596). After reading several of Wright's works, one can easily understand what Wright means by this statement. In his books Black Boy, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and The Outsider, Wright suggests that white society has transformed black people into criminals. The source of this claim comes from Wright's personal experiences as a Negro in the Deep South. Whether pushed to crime from necessity or for personal fulfillment and self-realization, the protagonists of Wright's works are innocent criminals; they know that the ultimate crime for which they are being punished is the crime of being black. Circumstances created by a racist social order place the characters in intolerable positions that coerce them into villainous activities.

In his autobiographical novel, Black Boy, Wright supports this theory using himself as an example. In the tradition of the slave autobiography, Black Boy provides details of Wright's life from early childhood to his arrival in Chicago. As Joyce Ann Joyce says, Black Boy:

...is a realistic and poetic account of the hunger Wright endured as a child, his closeness to his mother, the effect of his mother's illness, his problems with his father, his father's desertion, the violence he experienced from his mother's relatives, his love of words and books, his discovery of racism and his developing racial consciousness, his fight against his mother's and grandmother's religion, his scanty education, ... and the development of his individuality...

... middle of paper ...

...chard Wright. New York: Harcourt, 1969. Rpt. in

Richard Wright's Native Son: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Moss, Robert F. "Caged Misery." Saturday Review. Jan. 21, 1978, 45-7. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 14. Detroit: Gale, 1980.

Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. "Composing Bigger: Wright and the Making of Native Son." in Richard Wright's

Native Son: Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1944.

_____. "How Bigger Was Born." Saturday Review. June 1, 1940, n.pag. Rpt. in Native Son. New

York: Harper, 1940.

_____. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.

_____. The Outsider. New York: Harper, 1953.

_____. Uncle Tom's Children. New York: Harper, 1936.

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