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The Theme Of Hunger In Richard Wright's 'Black Boy'

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The Hunger that Follows
Richard Wright sends his reader on a journey through the memories of his past and the struggles he endured in his memoir Black Boy. In this detailed recollection of his life, Richard discusses the challenges he faced while living in the South and how he managed to overcome these obstacles on his journey to becoming a successful writer. It is only fitting then that the subtitle of the book be American Hunger as much of Richard’s life is consumed with hunger both literally and metaphorically and only becomes more prominent as her begins to discover the world around him. Although Richard has found ways to improve his hunger for food and the huger to become a writer, ultimately, he is unsatisfied and feels that the only way to stop his hunger is to escape his …show more content…

Richard by the age of six had already become an alcoholic because when he went to the saloon he could fill his stomach with alcohol and quench his appetite. A year after this incident, Richard explains that, “Hunger was with us always”(pg.28). Richard associates hunger with his father as hunger continues to follow Richard throughout his adolescence from the moment his family fell apart and his mother was left to fend for herself and her children. Part of the reason Richard does not have enough food is because blacks in the South could not get high paying jobs like Ella, his mother, would need in order to support her family properly. Unfortunately for Richard, his mother ends up sending Richard and his brother to an orphanage until she can make more money to care for him. Richard reacts to the hunger by keeping busy to the point where he is so weak from hunger while pulling the grass from the orphanage yard that he begins to black out and hallucinate. At this point in his life hunger has consumed him and caused him so much pain that this scene only makes him stronger in the

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“The first week of my being among them I hardly ate anything; the second week I found my stomach grow very faint for want of something; and yet it was very hard to get down their filthy trash; but the third week, though I could think how formerly my stomach would turn against this or that, and I could starve and die before I could eat such things, yet they were sweet and savory to my taste.” The use of food allows the readers to understand that despite the quality of food given it is still a blessing to have something to

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The Nonfiction Novel, Black Boy was written By Richard Wright. In the Novel Richard uses various tools of rhetorical to convey his point of determination and aspiration while growing up as an African American boy in Jim Crow South, facing the social and economic struggles that were very stereotypical for African Americans during the time. Black Boy is about a long lived struggle of hunger for not only food, but acceptance, an understanding of the world, love and an important unappeasable hunger for knowledge. Wright is faced with daily obstacles and struggles living in poverty as he is determined to leave behind these circumstances.

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He starved to show people his pain. It wasn’t all just for entertainment. He wanted people to know how he felt on the inside, it was kind of like a cry for help. The Hunger Artist wished for people to understand how he felt. He never got to feel that satisfaction

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The traumas he had endured at the various concentration camps have completely drained him of every drop of his spirituality. At this point he could only be bothered by the development of starvation. The only worries he had was wondering when his next meal would be or if he’ll even have a next meal. “Hunger was tormenting us; we had not eaten for nearly six days except for a few stalks of grass and some potato peels found in the grounds of the kitchens.” (p.114)

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Just to show how separate these two stories are, Black Boy opens up with young Richard lighting straw on fire in his grandmother’s furnace while his brother repeatedly tells him to stop. Richard then sets his grandmother’s curtains ablaze just to understand what would happen. This event is a representation of Richard’s constant struggle to understand the separation between black and white and the way the world works now while at the same time being constantly badgered about how he should stop trying to understand everything and should just go along with everything. Because of Richard’s constant desire to understand everything, he repeatedly creates turmoil in his numerous households. An example being when he moves back into his grandmother’s house and takes up an extreme obsession with reading while his heavily religious grandmother, who believes that anything fictional is the work of the devil.

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From chapter 3 of To Kill A Mockingbird and “Where the Food is Both Scarce and Risky,” both texts states about the negative effects of poverty involving with food. Jem invites Walter Cunningham over for lunch when he finds out that the boy doesn 't have any food. Walter asks for some molasses and proceeds to pour it all over his plate of food. Scout rudely ask him what the sam hill he was doing. Calpurnia gives her a lecture in the kitchen about how to treat their guests.

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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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I believe this “hunger” is a representation of not only their physical hunger but also the want for more in their own lives. This hunger lead them to do wrong, despite wanting to do good, “Well, sir, I ain’t never been mixed up in nothin’ wrong, before nor since, and I don’t intend to be again, but I was hungry that night” (253). This leads me to my 2nd point; when you are hungry for more in your life you tend to not fight for what you want or believe in. “But Edward didn’t holler. He just sat down on the coal.

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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.

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Richard has always felt the unjust of race, and has felt how segregation made it hard for him to have a future. But when he gets a chance to get revenge on the whites, he refuses when he thinks ”Who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to walk and act like a man.(200)” Stealing went against his morals of the right way to succeed and would not help the community appearance to the whites. The community as a whole is very religous but Richard does not share these beliefs, even with the persistence of his friends and family he says ”Mama, I don't feel a thing.(155)” This caused his friends to beg him, but in face of rejection they leave him alone.

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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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In the autobiography “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, Richard learns that racism is prevalent not only in his Southern community, and he now becomes “unsure of the entire world” when he realizes he “had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature” by delivering a Klan newspaper. He is now aware of the fact that even though “Negroes were fleeing by the thousands” to Chicago and the rest of the North, life there was no better and African Americans were not treated as equals to whites. This incident is meaningful both in the context of his own life story and in the context of broader African American culture as well. At the most basic level, it reveals Richard’s naïveté in his belief that racism could never flourish in the North. When

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The world is very crucial and it is best to avoid the obstacles in our path and move on. To begin, Richard Wright’s Black Boy portrays society and class in numerous subjects. Violence, racism, and discrimination are some of the many ways society and class was demonstrated in the novel. When he was little, Richard has faced terrors a young child should never interfere with.

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The Harlem Renaissance was a development period that took place in Harlem, New York. The Renaissance lasted from 1910 to about the mid-1930s, this period is considered a golden age in African American culture. This Renaissance brought about masterful pieces of music, literature, art, and stage performance. The Harlem Renaissance brought about many prominent black writers such as Richard Wright. Richard Wright is a highly acclaimed writer, who stressed the importance of reading, writing, and words.

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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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