Richard Wright's Use Of Characterization In Black Boy
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Richard Wright presents his growth as a person using characterization in Black Boy. Wright is a black individual living in early 20th century America, who his facing the hardships of being a black man in that time period. He portrays his pull to literature, his solitude from fellow Negroes and how he was misapprehended by society to reveal an evolution of his growth through literature.
Scratching around the edges of Black Boy, can reveal the traits that make Richard unique, including his attraction to knowledge and reading by his thoughts. Being denied the ability to continue reading Bluebeard and His Seven Wives, “[he] hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given [him]” (40). When Richard…show more content… Once he sees how his family treats his brother, “[he] felt that the affection shown by the family was far greater than that which [he] had ever had from them…[his] loneliness became organic” (174). By using a metaphor to refer to his loneliness as “organic”, Richard infers that his feeling of alienation is raw, bare and in its most pure form. Feeling a separation from his family shows how Richard has lost the link between himself and his family because of his vulgar actions in the past compared to his brother’s. After a white coworker provided Richard with the privilege of having books at his fingertips, “[his] reading had created a vast sense of distance between [himself] and the world in which [he] lived” (253). The “vast sense of distance” Richard feels is not physical, but emotional because the more information he uncovers, the more the world seems foreign. The gap between Wright and his life’s reality illuminates his disconnection from the society in which he lives. Richard receives the effect of his past mistakes and conflicts with his family as well as beginning to find new ones in the adult world in the form of withdrawal from the