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A Brief Look At Richard Wright's Black Boy

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In Richard Wright’s autobiographical novel Black Boy, Richard is portrayed as an adventurous character with a passion for literature. When he comes into contact with it as a child and is filled with the desire to write, he develops ideas going against his Southern environment. These ideas fade with time, as he learns of the South’s culture and his subsequent expectations as a Black person in this society. However, his ambitions and rebellious ideas are reignited, and his perspective of the South’s people changes as he rediscovers literature. Richard’s relationship with literature reflects the fluctuating and overall decreasing degree to which he assimilates with the South’s culture. The presence of writing in his life represents his independent …show more content…

When Richard rediscovers literature in the books he borrowed from the library via Mr. Falk, he reminisced how, “I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing” (249). Richard’s past experience with writing was refreshing and allowed his “crude imagination roam,” indicating its rough, probing form, highlighted in the hyper nature of his description, with fragments separated by commas. This inexperience is then juxtaposed by the “experience” he has in the South. Being “slowly beaten” into acculturation communicates his torturous lessons of society’s expectations that forced him to slow, ceasing his dreams and consequently his dismissal of the South. When his desire for books resurfaces, the common theme of “hunger” appears, emphasizing the weight of his desires, on par with the need for something essential to survival—food. His description of reading as “new ways of looking and seeing” is similar to his vision of the North in the past. This repeated association accentuates literature’s encouragement of his northbound dreams. With this, he seeks new perspectives other than the ideas of the South that he’s grown up with. Richard’s thirst for literature outweighs what he’s learned that Southern society expects of him, underlining the defiant nature literature

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