Black Boy Hunger Quotes

In Richard Wright’s “Black Boy,” the hunger for love, food, and knowledge was evident for the character Richard. It would be hard and possibly impossible to find someone without any of this hunger in the real world today. This story is a tale of determination and faith. All of his life he has been hungry. Hunger means to have a strong desire or craving for something. With that being said, Richard’s hunger was not just food. He was also hungry for acceptance, love and understanding of the world around him. His most important hunger though, was the hunger for knowledge. Richard had nothing to eat. He was no longer in school, so he was actually starved. Hus dad left the family and abandoned them. They became extremely poor after this. before he knew his dad left he sort of prepared himself for it. He was hallucinating about how hungry he was. “hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played. But now I began to wake myself up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside staring at me gantly.” Sometimes he would be so weak from huner that he cold bareky move. The neighbors would offer him food but he would not accept it. He did not want anyone to know his struggle. The want and need for him to put food in his belly is what kept his determined and gave him that drive to work hard.

When his father left he became deprived of that love. A big part he did not understand was the gap between blacks and whites. “I wanted to understand these two sets of people who lived side by side but never touvhed, except violence.” He questioned the adults around him but he was punished for it. He was at first unable to accept the treatment he received. What was it that made the whites and blacks hate eachtoher? What kibd of life possessed this hate? How did the hate become? He hoped that things would later be different. His faith grew stringer but then after a while it died