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Motifs In Richard Wright's Black Boy

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The historical memoir of Richard Wright, Black Boy, frequently used motifs to demonstrate a common theme. The most prominent one was hunger, which represented the need for food and the eagerness to escape the restraints of the segregated South. During the early to mid 90’s, the southern United States was in a time period of severe prejudices, which promoted violence and inequality against the African Americans. In effect to this, Richard was always desperately hungry throughout his childhood, both literally and figuratively. For African Americans of this time period, employment was hard to come by and paid next to nothing. Families, like Richards, did not have enough to support growing children. Richard and his family was always under stress …show more content…

The Deep South made this a dream next to impossible to achieve because it was hard to graduate from high school, improbable to get into a college (most of them were whites only) and unheard of to get respectable employment opportunities. When Richard was working for the white woman’s household, she remarked. “You’ll never be a writer (...) who on earth put such ideas into your (...) head?” (Wright 147) The discrimination is eminent, however, whenever Richard is told that he cannot do something, it does not make him stop. He keeps going. When Aunt Addie humiliated him in front of the class he did not stop going to school. Even though he changed schools he never stopped studying or gave up on his dream. He hungered for writing and after he wrote, “The Voodoos of Hell’s Half-Acre”, he was once again put down by multiple people. They did not believe that he wrote it because of the stereotype that all black children who grew up where he did in Mississippi were liars. However, hidden under all the negative comments, Richard felt he succeeded because it was his first public short story that people took the time to read. The newspaper editor told Richard, “This story will put your name before our readers. Now, that's something.” (Wright 166) This assured Richard that maybe he did not need the money for it, but he still argued for it. However, he was

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From a very young age and most of his life, Richard Wright had suffered from hunger. Because hunger was normal for Richard, he could not even think about eating food everyday. Richard has experienced several different stages of hunger. In Richard Wright's novel Black Boy, Richard suffers from physical, emotional, and mental hunger. Richard Wright had suffered from physical hunger throughout his life.

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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.

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Richard Wright was born after the American Civil War but before the Civil Rights Movement. He faced the harsh realities of the racist south and wrote about the oppression he faced as a black boy growing up in Mississippi in the 1940s and how he struggled to leave. In his autobiography, Black Boy, Richard addresses the social issues prevalent at the time. Although he grew up more than 70 years ago, African Americans still face the same prejudices now, as they did in the past. If Richard Wright were to write an autobiography in 2017 titled, Black Boy, he would write about the progress President Obama has made for equality and how the newly elected President Trump’s proposals are hastily trying to reverse what was done.

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It was not a matter of believing what I had read, but of felling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different,” (Wright 248). Richard is finally able to understand racism and that he is a black man in the south through the art of literature. When Wright begins working, he is able to enrich his hobby of reading and writing. Later, Richard Wright begins to notice a new point of view which writing has given him

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One of the hungers that Richard goes through, is the hunger for learning and knowledge. In Black Boy, Wright describes his hunger for knowledge. After Ella, a young school teacher reads Blackbeard and his Seven Wives. Wright observes, “I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking almost painful excitement the story had given me…. I burned to read novels.”

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If those boys bother you, then fight,” she said. As for Richard’s father, he left when Wright was young, requiring his mother to struggle to earn enough money to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Richard realizes he has to help his mom and goes off to find a job at six years of age. This shows how he cares for his mom and he is willing to do whatever it takes. Racism is a big part of this novel.

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Since they do not earn a decent wage, they don’t have the minimum amount of luxury in their lives. They are deprived of homes, food and other essential necessities. The effect of racial discrimination discloses on Wright in the guise of starvation. As a child, Richard could not grasp the concept of racism. But when he grows up, he acknowledges why he and his sibling need to feast upon the leftover sustenance of the white individuals.

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“I had a series of petty jobs for short periods, quitting some to work elsewhere, being driven off others because of my attitude, my speech, the look in my eyes” (Wright 182). Richard is at first confused why he is being fired, but as it happens more and more he learns the smallest actions can infuriate white people. Richard struggles to accept these features that are deemed unacceptable and adjusts his behavior in the presence of whites. “What I had heard

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The novel Black Boy by Richard Wright exhibits the theme of race and violence. Wright goes beyond his life and digs deep in the existence of his very human being. Over the course of the vast drama of hatred, fear, and oppression, he experiences great fear of hunger and poverty. He reveals how he felt and acted in his eyes of a Negro in a white society. Throughout the work, Richard observes the deleterious effects of racism not only as it affects relations between whites and blacks, but also relations among blacks themselves.

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