Black Boy Essay Questions

Black Boy Essay The world has always endured hunger, but not always the conventional hunger that we are all familiar with. “Why could I not eat when I was hungry” (Wright pg.19) Although this statement regards his physical hungers, Wright also expresses his other hungers throughout his life. In “Black Boy” Richard Wright grows up in the Jim Crow South where he experiences a hunger for emotional expression and connection as well as the hunger for knowledge.

Ever since Wright's childhood, he has longed for connection with others, to end this isolation. When Wright enters a methodist church he observes “I longed to be among them, yet when with them, I looked at them as if I were a million miles away.”() All throughout Wright’s life

When Ella, a woman renting a room in Granny’s house, reads him Bluebeard, Wright discovers the world of literacy. “I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough, I would buy all the novels there were and read them to feed that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigues, for plotting, for secrecy, for bloody murders” (46) Wright had a fuse lit in him that makes him crave for knowledge and marks a pivotal moment in Wright’s life. This was probably one of the most important points in his life because it introduces him to a new world that could lead him out of the Jim Crow south. After Wright reads an editorial about H.L. Mencken, he wants to learn more and risks borrowing a library card from a sympathetic white co-worker, Mr.Falk. “... I would stop reading. But a vague hunger would come over me for books, books that opened up new avenues of feeling and seeing…” (252) The books Richard reads opens up a new world for him which satisfies him and most importantly, it validates him. All throughout Richard’s life, he’s never felt like a normal person because he’s always been repressed by his society for being himself, but his books validate his emotions, his thinking, it validated himself as a human being overall. Throughout Wright's life he is plagued by hunger for food nearly every day, but also terribly affected by the invisible hungers for knowledge and emotional connection which tortures his young soul. Nevertheless, Richard Wright surpasses these obstacles and uses these hardships he’s been put through to mold himself into a strong independant African American man who goes to succeed in the world. The ambition and perseverance that Wright possess is far greater than many people in today’s