Richard Wright’s father (Nathan Wright) has impacted and shaped Richard by making Richard’s young life full of anger, sorrow, and sadness and his grown life full of skepticism, regret, and emptiness. This is shown when Richard briefly writes about his father. Wright recalls and describes what his father looks like to him as well as how their relationship was, “He was the lawgiver in our family and I never laughed in his presence. I used to lurk timidly in the kitchen doorway and watch his huge body sitting slumped at the table….He was quite fat and his bloated stomach always lapped over his belt. He was always a stranger to me, always somehow alien and remote” (Wright 10). The way Richard describes his father shows that even before Nathan