Category: Black Boy

His Black identity comes to the fore when he goes on to say that this story ‘gave form and meaning to confuse defensive feelings that had long been shaping in me’. Hostility towards the whites develops further in Richard. As he writes, “Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused” ( BB 84).

However, Richard confesses that he has never been abused by whites in his life. He goes on to say, “….but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings” (BB 84).

Richard asks three vital questions and gives his own comments on them, “Man, what makes white folks so mean?” Returning to grapple with the old problem.

“Whenever I see one I spit,” Emotional rejection of whites

“Man, ain’t they ugly?” Increased emotional rejection. (BB 91)

The following analysis highlights the rebellious nature of Richard Wright. Here, the researcher focuses on the responses of Wright rather than on the humiliating incidents.

Richard’s fighting instinct is revealed in the Aunt Addie incident. He fights as he has never fought in his life for being punished for an offence he is not guilt of. He is shocked to read a Ku Klux Khan doctrine in a newspaper. The doctrine advocates lynching as a solution to the problem of the Black. He is piqued when he is asked by a white lady if he steals. He gives her an acidic reply.

“Lady, if I was a thief, I’ll never tell anybody” (BB 91).When he is taunted about his ignorance of how to milk a cow, he writes, “I said nothing, but I was quickly learning the reality of –a Negro’s reality of the white world” (BB 163). But he is not so reticent with his uncle. He erupts thus to him. “You are not an example to me; you could never be”, I spat at him. “You‘re a warning. Your life isn’t so hot that you can tell me what to do” (BB 176).

Richard Wright meets a white boss in the brickyard who says, “A dog bite can’t hurt a nigger”. But Richard adamantly argues with him that it has hurt him, when Bob’s brother is killed by the whites for meddling with a white prostitute, he comments thus, “The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness” (BB 190).

While working as a porter in clothing stores selling cheap goods to Blacks on credit, he sees a Black woman beaten up for not paying her bills. These experiences breed in Richard an alertness when he is dealing with white people. As he says, “I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what was said and what was left unsaid” (BB 200).

Richard undergoes a strange experience when he goes to a white residential area to make deliveries; the white policemen stop him and search his pockets and package. They ask him to tell his boss not to send him out in white neighbourhood at that time of night. Once when his boss’s son asks him why he doesn’t laugh and talk like the other niggers, he replies, “Well, sir, there’s nothing much to say or smile about” (BB 201).

From Griggs, one of his old classmates, Richard learns a lot about the Black problem. Griggs reminds him again and again that he is black. He is going to teach him how to get out of white people’s way. He makes him understand that the white people want him out of their way. He must act around white people as if he did not know that they are white. When he is in front of white people, he must think before he acts and think before he speaks, this way of doing things is all right among their own people but not for white people.

The conventional attitude of the blacks towards the whites surprises Richard Wright. He marvels at how smoothly the black boys acted out the roles that the white race had mapped out for them. Most of them are not conscious of living a special, separate, stunted way of life. There had been development in them a delicate, sensitive controlling mechanism that shut off their minds and emotions from all that the white race has called taboo. The white night watchman slaps at the backs of the Black girls who do not mind it. As one of the girls says, “It don’t matter. They do that all the time” (BB 218). But Richard resents the dirty behaviour of the white. When the watchman says that he seems not to like it, he is unable to move or speak. His immobility appears to be a challenge to him. He can never make subservience an automatic part of his behavior. As he says,

Misreading the reactions of whites around me made me say and do the wrong things. In many dealing with whites I was conscious of the entirety of my relations with them, and they were conscious only of what was happening at a given moment. I had to keep remembering what others took for granted, I had to think out what others felt. (BB 215)

When he fails to take off his hat while meeting a white man, he is asked to take off his hat. He does not like shorty, one of the most colourful of the Black boys getting kicked up in the rump by the whites and receiving money for it. When the white men try to goad him into a fight with Harrison, a Black boy working in a rival optical company, he feels that the blacks are like dogs or cocks to the white people.

Leaving the south for the north appears to be a remedy for all the ills that Richard has experienced. He decides to fight the southern white by organizing with other Blacks. As he writes, “I was leaving the south to fling myself into the unknown, to meet other situations that would perhaps elicit from me other responses” (BB 284).

He leaves for north with ever watchful eyes bearing scars, visible and invisible. He has a hazy notion that life can be lived there with dignity without the necessity of facing others with neither fear nor shame. In order to get ahead in the white world, Wright decided to take the civil service exam in order to obtain work at the local post office, an exam he had brooded over for many months due to his deteriorating financial situation. While awaiting full-time position at the local post office, Wright sought federal financial relief and was placed in a distinguished research hospital as part of the assistance program. Like all other black employees, Wright was assigned mindless work and confined to the basement “with three other Negroes with whom I worked. They had no curiosity about white folk’s things” (BB 358). When he asked them questions, all would become angry and wanted to know why he was so interested in such foolishness; why did he have to be so uppity and want to learn about things he could never understand. Similarly, he would draw harsh reactions fromwhite doctors who would say things like “if you know too much boy, your brains might explode” (BB 359). When he inquired about the experiments done on dogs, Wright remembered that a “young Jewish doctor would simply ignore me with; ‘Come on. Bring the next dog. I haven’t got all day” (BB 359).

One more incident at the hospital would launch Wright into a great sense of self-pride. During a scuffle over who was more “intelligent”, two of his fellow employees had gone to blows in the room that held all of the animals under scientific study. In the process, all of the cages had fallen, specimen records became mixed up, and animals ran everywhere. In a flash Wright had wisely broken up the fight and supervised the restoration of the room, but great doom struck them. Though the room was in order, all of the information was misplaced, and months of crucial research had been ruined, all grounds for a dismissal followed by a stereotypical Southern lynching. But Wright had done well and things eventually went unnoticed. In a farewell to that episode, Wright provides a subversive reminder of the brutal realities found in 1930s America:

I brooded of course, upon whether I should have gone to the director’s office and told him what had happened, but each time I thought of it I remembered that the director had been the man who had ordered the boy to stand over me while I was working and time my movements with a stop watch. He did not regard me as a human-being. I did not share his world… The hospital kept us four Negroes, as though we were close kin to the animals we tended, huddled together down in a vast psychological distance from the significant processes of the rest of the hospital-just as America had kept us locked in the dark underworld of American life for three hundred years-and we had made our own code of ethics, values, and loyalty. (BB 370)

During this period, Wright became involved with the John Reed Club, a minor faction of the Communist Party, and his views on racial defiance and race relations changed drastically. He had absorbed an inexhaustible amount of revolutionary literature and was now able to mix with whites and blacks freely while discussing the varying perspectives on finding truth in the world. It had taken quite some time but he had finally found a group of men representing many cultures, men who had struggled and experienced much of the same social and economic oppression that he had. During his initiation Wright was assigned the task of writing for Party journals and newspapers and had done quite well at it, but for some reason he could not rid himself of the mistrust he felt for some in his group. Several of the whites felt that he was an attribute to the group but he was quite shocked to hear that “I, who had only been to grammar school, was classified as an intellectual” (BB 388). Other whites were clearly agitated by such arrogance but never made it an issue. Ironically, it was the black members of the Party whom he disliked, oppressed men and women, poor and uneducated, who let it be known that uppity, defiant blacks like Wright were not welcome. Wright’s most disturbing moments in the party, he recollects, were when his own people turned against him:

I learned, to my dismay, that the Black Communists in my unit had commented upon my shined shoes, my clean shirt, and tie I had worn. Above all, my manner of speech had seemed an alien thing to them. ‘He talks like a book,’ one of the Negro comrades had said. And that was enough to condemn me forever as bourgeois. (BB 389)

Like so many times before, Wright’s outspoken nature had offended other blacks, but he understood their reasoning clearly. Much like his own childhood, they too had experienced racism and oppression and because of it “just did not know anything and did not want to learn anything. They felt that all questions had been answered, and anyone who asked new ones or tried to answer old ones was dangerous” (BB 390). Dangerous he was, but Wright was a non-conformist, a free thinker who had always possessed the intellect to speak freely, and for a while he did so, but not without penalty. After rising to the ranks in the Party many begrudged Wright’s intellectualism and failure to abide by Party practices. Those who disliked him associated his intelligence with betrayal, an enormous violation of their principles. Wright grew numb with despair, but he would not succumb to any measure of the Party’s ideological control. As an independent thinker he could no longer associate with Communist ideals and had ultimately come to conclude that all men, both black and white, would meet the same fate if mutual grounds were not shared.

In the final pages, Wright reflects back on his life and his choices, both good and evil. He had the desire to exist freely without regard to skin color, so he moved North to find his inner-self. Without hesitation he asked himself what he had achieved by being defiant. What did he get out of the city? And what did he get out of the South? These were questions that would continue to create a void in Wright’s self for many years, but his last words in Black Boy provide insight into the great mystery, a prophecy that would provide strength and guidance for future endeavors,

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. (BB 453)

Wright’s Black Boy facilitates Wright’s overall theme of defiance, which directs him ultimately in the path of finding his own identity. He does not fit to the role of a meek little black boy, who indulges in fantacy in order to drive his sense of suppression away. He neither finds himself as a communist nor as a biased racist. His quest had continued, till he identified himself as a existentialist humanist, who wanted to immortalize the sense of humanism in each and every heart.

In this novel “ Black boy “ has an main character, Richard Wright. In this novel he’s reflecting on his childhood experiences and how some events affected him mentally, physically and emotionally. He tells the readers how he was influenced in life and how society impacted him. His family and peers of course had and major impact on his life and he shares how his childhood made him who he is today.

In the novel , Richard is very particular with his words, As I mentioned previously his family really impacted his childhood in the worst ways. For example in the text he says “ I lost consciousness. I was beaten out my senses and later found myself in bed , screaming , determined to run away , tussling .. “ page 7. This quote shows how he was treated growing up and why he ended up being the way he is now. Like us all the way our guardian raised us we more than likely will grow up to be the way we were raised which Richard is becoming.

Richard grew up having to fight just to fit in and not continue to get picked on by his peers. In the text he says “ knowing that if I did not win or make a good showing I would have to fight a new boy each day .. “ page 92. Richard knew if he didn’t stand up for his self he would have his peers picking fights with him each and every day. This just shows how society affects the way he grew up and it also shows him gaining self respect and strength without support from family.

After Richard gained respect from his peers he states “ having grown taller and older , I now associated with the older boys and I had to pay for my admittance into their company by subscribing to certain racial statements “ page 78. This shows how Richard has grown older and realized that in order to fit in he must let go over some self respect and now has to follow the stereotypes the boys gave him as an black man.

This relates because when you have an supportive family you would know you shouldn’t have to lower your self in order to fit in.

In conclusion if Ricard was raised based on love and care , not abuse and trauma , he more than likely wouldn’t want to fit in which means he wouldn’t have to fight each and every day. If he did have to fight atleast it would be for his self respect and not because he wanted to fight in.

People often say home is where the heart is, and personally, I believe this to be true. The technical definition of home is “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household” but I believe a home can be so much more than that. To me, a home is a place where you should feel safe and accepted, a place you can go to at the end of the day and trust to always be stable and comfortable.

Home can be anywhere, but at times it’s seen as where one’s close family resides. For example, In the book “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, the main character and author, Richard, moves homes many times and is forced to live with other relatives. All the while, he wishes to be as close to his mother as possible. For instance, when his mother suffers a stroke, she is unable to take care of him so he has to move in with a more distant family member. He chooses to live with his Uncle Clark since he’s the closest to what he refers to as his home, or with his mother. While on the way to Uncle Clark’s, Richard thinks to himself “I had always felt a certain warmth with my mother, even when we had lived in squalor; but I felt none here. Perhaps I was too apprehensive to feel any.” (Wright 89) This shows that despite moving again, Richard did not feel as if he would be truly at home without his mother, a source of love and trust in his life.

Sometimes, you even have to look inside yourself to help find what feels like home. A person can easily get lost in life and be unable to find their way back to a place of comfort, or their home. The song “Never Gonna Let You Down” by Colbie Caillat describes this perfectly, a portion of the song saying “If your heart’s been broke; And you feel like you’re all alone; If you need something to believe in; If you’re looking for a light to guide you home; Just look inside; You’re a light shining brighter than you know” Not only does this show that a person can find strength within themselves, but it also implies that finding your way home means to find stability and comfort. The song shows that emerging from a troublesome situation allows you to find your way home, or back to a place of stability and comfort.

Comfort is often provided by the people we surround ourselves with, family, friends, and even a significant other. The song “Home” by Phillip Phillips talks about this, one of its verses saying “The trouble it might drag you down; If you get lost you can always be found; Just know you’re not alone; Cause I’m gonna make this place your home” This describes how through troubles, familiarity can be found in another person. Being in a new place can be stressful, but having one person you trust to always be there for you can make it feel like a home.

So yes, home is where the heart is. Whether that be with friends, family, a significant other, or elsewhere. While the word home’s meaning still remains as a place of shelter, it can mean so much more if looked into. As said by Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Where we love is our home- home that our feet may leave but not our hearts.” Meaning, people love to have a place of comfort, something or someone to always come back to during hard times that makes them feel secure.

Both “Still I Rise” and “Black Boy” from Maya Angelou and Richard Wright have inspired people with their stories. “Black Boy” and “Still I Rise” being powerful stories, all about the struggles of having hope. Have given the message, no matter what happens the protagonist will always rise.

The poem “Still I Rise” and the book Black Boy has similarities in the stories in the way they show courage and hope.

Both Maya/Richard convey similarities as they both show Courage. In different occasion, they showed how they overcame everything with their self-esteem. For example in “Black Boy” by Richard Wright has shown how Richard (the main character) had to be a man and stand for himself in his childhood. When Richard had the task to go buy groceries, he got beaten by other kids in his neighborhood. Her mom taught hen to stand for himself because no one would. It says, “You just stay right where you are,’ she said in a deadly tone. ‘I’m going to teach you this night to stand up and fight for yourself.’ ‘Take this money, this note, and this stick,’ she said. ‘Go to the store and buy those groceries. If those boys bother you, then fight.’ (1.1.206 Wright) This shows courage in the way how Richard had to stand up for himself. After Richard getting beaten more than once, he portrays courage and showing how he will always get up when put down. In the Poem “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou conveys courage too. It says “You may write me down in history, With your bitter, twisted lies, You may tread me in the very dirt, But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” ( Angelou) In the poem, Maya Angelou reveals how she will always reveal, how she will overcome anything with the courage she has shown. Both stories covey’s message of courage because they show that they will what always get up.

Maya Angelou/Richard Wright also portrays hope in the stories. They have shown multiple occasion how they have hope for their dream or beliefs. In “Black Boy” by Richard wrights shows how Richard ( the main character) has hopes on his dreams, and how no one can stop hen of having hope. This is shown in the book where his uncle is trying to tell Richard that he can’t’ achieve anything. If Richard accomplished something of his dreams, someone will bring hen down. ‘You’ll never amount to anything,’ he said, shaking his head and blinking his eyes in astonishment. ‘I’m not worried about that,’ I said. ‘All I want you to do is keep away from me, now and always…’You’ll end on the gallows,’ he predicted. ‘If I do, you’ll have nothing to do with it,’ I said.[…]’Somebody will yet break your spirit,’ he said.’It won’t be you!’ ‘You’ll get yours someday! ‘You won’t be the one to give it to me!’ (1.6.42-57) this show how Richard believes oh having hope for his dreams. Also, it demonstrates that society will like to see hen broken, but still, Richard will have hope of achieving what he believes. Just like Black Boy. In the poem of Maya Angelou, “Still I Rise” symbolize the hope too. “Out of the huts of history’s shame, I rise, Up from a past that’s rooted in pain, I rise.”(Angelou) Maya Angelou talks about having the hope of rising no matter what struggles she has. She explains how her poem covey’s the message of hope because she shows that not even their skin color can stop here Also, the scene demonstrates hope that she obtain despite all the problems the character of the poem has had.

In conclusion, Both Maya/Richard convey similarities as they both show Courage and hope. The stories portray courage and hope by showing how the characters will always get up when put down. Also, both characters in the stories show not even their skin color will stop them from having courage and hope.

“Hunger baffled me, scared me, made me angry and insistent.” (Richard Wright). A giant writer in American literature, known through his book “Black Boy” and other books as well, was written in 1943 and was published two later in 1945, which is literally about himself, and his story is a response of his experience that he was grown up with, his father turned back on his family and his mother was not able to feed her boy at the age of 10. His work is particularly about the discrimination, violence, and conflicts besides that, suffering from depression and poverty. Even though he suffered from social problems all that didn’t even stop him to be a successful writer and in his mind, he doesn’t have to use communism to join up with his surroundings. Richard Wright displays the struggle that black had and felt for identity in American society, apparently in his book “Black Boy” shows hunger and suffering, his memoir of racism, and his movement.

To begin with description of tough surviving an African American man in south Chicago. At an early age, he, therefore, noticed the reason some people have different skin colors and others would be able to distinguish their race. However, he understood these distinctions mean through different observation cultural and political, Wright tried to explain how southern society explores racism. Yet he demonstrated that racism was a product by a society itself and that is economically and politically unequal. Richard explained in his prestigious book, white families in the south are a privileged class versus black families serve them in need, and majority of white families behave in eagerness against them sue to black skin, though wealth class had the right to send their children to a special school which is absolutely an extreme disagree with black children who were disrespectfully treated. Richard Wright had still been finding a constant job, even though he joined the communist, which was supposed to be racial equality. Foremost, he found out that only white men could control their activities, afterward, he identified that black workers would not share their beliefs.

Secondly, Hunger, illness, and suffering in Richard’s family as he said:” hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played”, “but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside starving at me gauntly” (1,1,156). When Richard’s father left the house, he with his family would become destitute. From time to time, his mom was usually working in the kitchen, cooking for families this was a huge objection to Richard, at that time didn’t want any food comes from rich families, he was very proud of himself, hunger became to him one of the dominant emotions of his youth young life. However, latterly his mom was ill and paralyzing of matter her extreme pain thus he made a decision to move in with his grandmother, despite the fact that wright moved to Jackson (Chicago), he still believed it was not a paradise for him, all the time he was struggling only with white society and there his negative emotional feelings with hunger connected to his old souvenirs further not removed from his mind,

Thirdly, behind his movement there were a bunch of consequences to prove his status in society, this pressure caused him separation with his classmates and friends, in his memoir he highly mentioned that, he was feeling a distance between him with member of his family, in his mind will never abandon the side or part of southern Chicago his life condition let him move from apartment to other apartments, experimenting life between white and black, he was always overthinking, his moving caused him tough life due to lower-wage, somehow his movement is community proved him as a rebellion, he was definitely grabbling for freedom.

Black people have had a hard time going through many different situations just because of their skin color. Every single individual deserves to receive their own rights and be treated equally. Growing up in the 20th century was hard, because racism happened all the time. The Blacks suffered a lot through different oppressions; it makes them hurt both physically and mentally.

In the book Black Boy, Richard Wright is the author of his book and protagonist. He shared his early life to the readers which shows how much Black people faced mental and physical violence. He talked about how Blacks deal with much discrimination and racist situations during the Jim Crow era in the United States’ South. Lots of Black Americans suffered unfairly since they didn’t even do anything wrong. Wright was born in a violent and poor family. He got abuse and hate when he didn’t do anything wrong. People kept threatening and fighting him because they thought he was not the same with them, so he doesn’t get to live close to them since they are Whites Americans and he is Black. At the young age, not only the strangers bullied him, his parents also were a part of the violence. Wright’s mother beat and was violent to him too much, making him lose consciousness and become sick. When Wright and his brother were still very young, Wright’s dad left the family to live with another woman. At that young age without their father’s financial support, his family had to suffer through poverty and hunger. Since Richard Wright suffered a lot through hunger and hardship, he hated his father even more.

After his father left for another woman, a few years later Wright’s mother had a hard time to raise her children in Tennessee. By the age of six, Wright got into many troubles: he was an alcoholic, usually at the local saloon, and was spying on other people because his mother didn’t supervise her children enough since she had to work long hours. Her health became worse, so Wright had to work in order to provide income for his family. He did all the work that children usually don’t do. He was the only one at that moment who could work to earn money. He couldn’t attend school. He didn’t have the option to pick if he could go to school or not because of his current situation that his mom was sick, and his dad left his family to live with another woman. He also had to move to different states due to his childhood circumstances, which were his financial problems and the racism during the Jim Crow era in the South. Because Richard Wright couldn’t go to school, he had to learn through books that he found in the library. He ignored how strangers acted rudely to him and kept on with his passion for writing and reading to learn more knowledge. Not only that, he published his own story in the local black newspaper, and he was the valedictorian when he graduated from ninth grade. It showed that even though he had a hard time and suffered a lot, nothing could stop him from moving forward or make him give up.

During the 20th century, racism was a very big problem that affected the Black community. What happened to Richard Wright was not as bad when compared to what he went through at his workplace. He tended to get beat up by others because of racism. He got fired since his two White Southern co-workers think Black people don’t deserve to have skilled-work positions. Wright got really upset because of his boss who hired him didn’t help him much in the situation. All the racism hit his limit to handle, so he decided to move as soon as possible to the North. He was willing to steal in order to have enough money which allow him to move to Memphis where it is safer for him to temporarily stay before travelling to his last destination, Chicago. He has gone through all these terrible times because of how people were racist to him which created despair in him. Moving to Chicago didn’t improve his situation much, he continued to face segregation, poverty and racism. He worked at the corrupt insurance company which takes advantage of poor Black people which was against his own morals. He worked many different places, then he ended try to have a position in the post office. After that, the Great Depression occurred. It made lots of workers included Richard Wright become unemployment. That moment, he found that Communism was attracted to him, when its purpose is to protect those got oppressed. Wright became one of the Communist party members. Not while long later, he thought Communist party is the same to other parties, so he quitted the party on the May Day parade.

Beside Black Boy, in Separate Pasts the author, Melton McLaurin shared his own story about his childhood with his Black friend, Bobo. McLaurin is a White child who grows up in the small segregated town in Wade, North Carolina. He witnessed racism and discrimination activities everyday throughout his childhood times. In this small town, most public arenas and schools were segregated and racism was exhibited at everywhere. At the beginning of Separate Pasts, McLaurin talks about his first time recognized the difference between how Blacks and Whites were treated at where he lived. He was raised up in the racist attitudes and it affected a part of himself.

Bobo is a Black innocent child who was treated unequally during the 1950s because he has different skin color to others. McLaurin, Bobo and another Black child went to fill up a basketball game. Bobo tried to refill the ball first, then turned out he didn’t fill it up enough air. Since the ball didn’t have enough air, McLaurin tried to do it. The moment when he put the needle into his mouth, he was overwhelmed by the feeling that was always with him, engendered by attitudes handed down to him by those around him that he was threatened “with germs which, everyone said, were common among Blacks”.

Moreover, the dynamics of interracial sexual relations in the village were also a big issue. McLaurin told the reader about there was a White lady slept with a Black man. Both them ended up passed away by the shotgun from her White’s husband. The point that surprising people was not only the White guy was be acquitted, he was put on trial even it was obviously his fault. The racist attitudes and biases became bigger and bigger around the small town, no wonder when young White people would unknowingly adopt. Since they were grown up not in a good environment, it made them turn out into different people.

In conclusion, our society is modernized, so racism issue gets improved so much better, but there is still small group in the national that has people treat others unequally just because the difference of skin color. Instead of segregating, everyone should open their heart and mind to understand more other people in order to make the society better. Each one of us deserves to receive equal right in everything. We’re all human beings, we may look different, our personalities are different, but everyone has equal rights.

In the third chapter, the quest for identity in the Black Boy is examined. The work is the autobiography of Richard Wright’s own life in the South during his childhood and youth. It is a true document of race relations in America. Although an autobiography it is highly personalized, the author’s eyes and ears and emotions were vibrantly sensitive, so he missed as little of what went on around him as what went on inside him.

In Black Boy which traces his life from a four-year-old up to the period when he boards a train for the north, Wright punctuates his account here and there with the consciousness that he is a Black. This awareness comes to him casually and moves him in a big way. Right from his childhood days, Wright had rebelled against convention. The work is not only on a search for identity, but it is also on the Black boy’s finding his identity and his brave attempt to live with it fighting against all odds.

Wright was the breakthrough man who came all the way up from all the way down. He was suckled on resentment, nurtured on anger, grew up on rootlessness, and tasted every violent flavor of alienation and hostility.

The fourth chapter is a study of the Existential crisis in Wright’s The Outsider which centers around its Black protagonist, Cross Damon. It epitomizes the modern quest for absolute freedom and identity in the absurd and hostile environment. It is unique in the sense that it rejects communistic ideals and naturalism.

The Outsider portrays the unfortunate world of Cross Damon, a twenty-six year old Black, who recognizes himself an outsider in his home compelled by his utter loneliness, anger and untold suffering. To escape from the hard life of a postal clerk in the South side, he decides to go to New York to discover his real identity and unrestrained freedom. Cross Damon though lives with his family and friends and does work in the post office yet he takes no interest in them. His domestic life is crowded by three women: Glady, Dot, and his mother. He shows no responsibility for them. He remains absorbed in his own thoughts and burdens.

Cross Daman fails to determine his real position in society. He seems to be captured in the existential self. Every killing has given him a new identity in society. The only problem with Cross Daman is that he could not get a stable identity. In order to defend his existence, he adopts violent means. He knows the fact that murder is not the ultimate goal of his life. He seems to be a man of a rational approach. He is fully aware of the negative and positive aspects of his brutal action.

The Fifth chapter deals with The Long Dream-A Pyrrhic victory. The selected work, The Long Dream has been distinguished among Wright’s novels as the only one, which deals with the father-son relationship. It contains the author’s unique treatment of a successful Black businessman. Apart from its employment of archetypes and symbols, the moving portrayal of its subject endows the work with a poignancy that compares favorably with Wright’s earlier works.

The structure of The Long Dream is the step-by-step progress of Fishbelly, a shy black boy, from the safe, warm world of the Black ghetto into the lawless world between the races where a few Blacks, preying on black and white alike, have the arrogance to live by their wits.

Fishbelly’s triumph lies in the fact that, unlike his predecessors, he does not resort to violence as an act of self-definition. He survives because he is able to play the role that the ruling white society forces on him; a role which he will continue to play until he can escape to a more tolerant society. In other words, he remains alive because he respects the limits of his personal freedom.

The final chapter sums up the findings of the previous chapters. On the basis of the research conducted, avenues for further research possibilities have been suggested. The unifying factor in these works is illuminated when they are studied in chronological order since their individual responses to the frustrations of society point progressively towards strategies for survival, self-definition, and freedom within a social structure.