Desires of all types plague the human mind constantly. Certain desires are obvious and necessary, such as food and water. Others are more unique to humanity, such as education, respect, and love. When something or someone seems to stand in the way of an important yearning, desire becomes hunger. Over the course of world history, minorities have been repeatedly denied some of their most basic desires. An example would be the treatment of African-Americans in the United States until the later twentieth century. In Black Boy, Richard Wright characterizes his own multi-faceted hunger that drove his life in rebellion throughout the novel.
Richard’s hunger first manifested itself in the physical sense, a condition that would dominate and challenge his young life. Hunger motivated the majority of his important decisions, so as an author he choose to include many of these instances and often explicitly included the word as well. When Richard was six, his father abandoned the family, taking with him any security that they had. “Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant” (Wright 14). His hunger quickly became a focal point of his life, as a critic remarked, “Confronting hunger becomes all encompassing because it is physical as well as emotional… he strives to understand why he must starve while others are fed…. These events… influence Richard’s development and firmly establish the questioning tone of the text” (Camp). Camp suggests that Wright’s early use of hunger is meant to color a reader’s viewpoint from the beginning to the end. Richard began to go hungry at an impressionable age, but he turned a negative situation into a strong positive motivator. Hunger due to poverty ac...
... middle of paper ...
...multiple ways, leading Wright’s characterization of his own hungers to define the experience of all readers of Black Boy.
Works Cited
Camp, Carolyn. "The rhetoric of catalogues in Richard Wright's 'Black Boy.'." MELUS 17.4 (1991): 29+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.
Dykema-VanderArk, Anthony. "Critical Essay on 'Black Boy'." Nonfiction Classics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Nonfiction Works. Ed. David M. Galens, Jennifer Smith, and Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.
Mahony, Mary. "Critical Essay on 'Black Boy'." Nonfiction Classics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Nonfiction Works. Ed. David M. Galens, Jennifer Smith, and Elizabeth Thomason. Vol. 1. Detroit: Gale, 2001. Literature Resource Center. Web. 23 Feb. 2010.
The Yankee man then tried to offer Richard a dollar, and spoke of the blatant hunger in Richard’s eyes. This made Richard feel degraded and ashamed. Wright uses syntax to appropriately place the conversation before making his point in his personal conclusions. In the analogy, “A man will seek to express his relation to the stars.that loaf of bread is as important as the stars” (loaf of bread being the metonymy for food), Wright concludes, “ it is the little things of life “ that shape a Negro’s destiny. An interesting detail is how Richard refuses the Yankee’s pity; he whispers it.
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.
Staples, Brent. “Black Men and Public Space.” Reading Critically, Writing Well. Sixth edition Eds. Rise B. Axelrod and Charles R. Cooper. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002. 134-136. Print.
... middle of paper ... ... Sarah in Bread Givers and the narrator in "Soap and Water" each have a hunger that drives them in different directions: actual hunger for food, progress into society and a hunger for knowledge.
In a country full of inequities and discrimination, numerous books were written to depict our unjust societies. One of the many books is an autobiography by Richard Wright. In Black Boy, Wright shares these many life-changing experiences he faced, which include the discovery of racism at a young age, the fights he put up against discrimination and hunger, and finally his decision to move Northward to a purported better society. Through these experiences, which eventually led him to success, Wright tells his readers the cause and effect of racism, and hunger. In a way, the novel The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle illustrates similar experiences.
“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.
Richard Wright Black Boy By Richard Wright Collected Poems by Richard Wright The World of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre
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.
James, Johson Weldon. Comp. Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 832. Print.
Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” addresses several issues through its main character and eventual (though reluctant) hero Big Boy. Through allusions to survival and primal instincts, Wright confronts everything from escaping racism and the transportation (both literal and figurative) Big Boy needs to do so, as well as the multiple sacrifices of Bobo. Big Boy’s escape symbolizes both his departure from his home life and his childhood. Big Boy, unlike his friends, does not have a true name. This namelessness drives his journey, and Big Boy is constantly singled out in one way or another. The moniker ‘Big Boy’ is a contradiction—is he a large boy or is he a grown man?—and drives all of Big Boy’s actions. Throughout the story he hinges between childhood and adulthood, and his actions vary depending on which side he falls on at that exact moment.
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.
Tradition in the United States of America.” Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 12, No. 4. (Winter, 1978): 140-177.
Smith, David Lionel. “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics.” American Literary History. 3.1 (Spring 1991): 94-109.
In order to stress the various types of hunger that he felt, Hemingway uses repetition. He uses this device often, as the word “hunger” appears frequently throughout the entire passage. Hemingway uses the word to stress the significance some the different meanings and leave the reader to use syntax to figure it out the correct meaning. He used the phrase, “I knew I was hungry in a simple way” to let the reader know that he was hungry only because he had not eaten (Hemingway 57). He was not hungry for life or for art; he just needed food to satisfy his craving. Hemingway describes the hunger as simple because its meaning is the denotative form of the word. The other types of hunger are sometimes difficult to decipher. When Hemingway questioned Hadley if he was truly hungry, Hadley responded, “There are so many sorts of hunger. In the spring there are more, But that’s gone now. Memory is hunger” (Hemingway 57). When Hemingway asked Hadley to describe and define his hunger, there is repetition of the word in unconventional settings. Hadley shared Hemingway’s view that there are different types of hunger and explains that springtime brings the kind that he feels as a writer. During the spring, nature begins to bloom and the weather begins to warm; this is prime material for Hemingway to write. He also repeated the word in other parts of the novel when he writes, “Hunger is healthy and the pictures do look better when you are hungry” (Hemingway 72). Many people would never imagine that hunger is healthy, yet Hemingway used this to play with the denotative form of the word. In this sentence, he uses an oxymoron of sorts to explore the contrast between literally being hunger and the writer’s hunger that he feels.
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.