the careless boy

great improvement

It is now only a matter of money and opportunity before Richard will go North. These problems are resolved because he has learned how to play the role which his family and white people expect of him. He can play it in spite of the tension and deception it involves, now that he sees a light at the end of the tunnel. His people are no more aware of his inner life than are the white folks he works with. And so, always isolated and secretive, he makes his escape under a completely false pretext.

The voice of the boy Richard and the man Richard Wright have now merged into one. In flight he feels no elation or promise, but only the tension and fear he has grown accustomed to living with. He is not going toward something so much as away from something else. His whole life so far has been one of upheaval, travel, and flight, so this experience in itself is far from new to him.

Yet, as he moves, he is at least conscious of what the motive means. This is the difference, and the only one, between his journey now and all the ones that came before. He knows what it means to be leaving the South, to be American, to be black, to be a writer. He is nobody's victim, not even his own, as long as he can maintain this consciousness. It is the only freedom he knows and it began with that first overwhelming revelation he had at his mother's bedside: the "conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering." Henry James has said that consciousness is the only thing left to a man in the end. And this is Wright's conclusion now; to be conscious of meaninglessness is preferable to faking a meaning that is, it is the only possible state of mind for him.

The terrible price of this awareness is that Wright knows that he is what he is forever. And he will always be a southern product, perhaps transplanted in another climate, perhaps to blossom there away from home, but always southern. It is this past which he must struggle to understand and by understanding, forgive, as he lives in the North and elsewhere. He has some faith that this will happen, and, when it does, he will at least feel that those people who have done everything in their power to destroy him will, by his survival, have to change their ways. This is his revenge to take the whole of himself, and so much of himself is the South, away; to do more than endure; to flourish as an individual.

He has won a victory over the cruelty of humanity just by leaving the place of his birth. By his voluntary release, he has proved the whole system to be a fraud and a failure. This might, for some men, be sufficient cause to rejoice. But it takes the wisdom of Richard Wright to find no pleasure in victory. Instead he maintains, to the very end, his austere and poetic response to the whole of humanity.

Because Richard is growing throughout the book, his character is always changing. The small child we see at the beginning is a far cry from the seventeen-year-old at the end; yet there is a fundamental core which remains the same. He is a rebel and, as such, an outsider, from the very beginning.

Through his descriptions of people's reactions to him, Wright gives us a sense of the impression he makes on others. He offends most everyone, not for overt acts of defiance against them, but because of the attitude he expresses. He has few friends, but has no real enemies. He is not aggressive, but his presence is threatening. Unable to participate naturally in fun and games, he is irritating to those who do. Almost no one likes to have him around.

What social forces conspired to make him into this type of individual is the question that Richard Wright, the narrator, is trying to solve as he writes. It is said that one's character is pretty much formed by the age of four and, afterward, can only be modified to one degree or another by experience. Although Wright emphasizes social circumstances in creating an individual, he starts his autobiography with a solid characterization of himself as a child. There is, then, always a conflict between which is the stronger influence: character or society.

The question of how and why Wright's character was formed is hardest for him to answer in terms of his own development. It involves the complex problems of personal guilt as opposed to social guilt, personal responsibility as opposed to social responsibility. In the end, he can make no clear-cut distinctions between one or the other. Why he becomes who he is, or why he is the person he is becoming these are two inseparable questions.

The reader is always conscious of the unique nature of the author. In many ways he seems to consider himself exempt from normal human fallacies. Ruthless in his condemnation of any weakness, he is rarely self-critical. What he ultimately discovers in his self-analysis is that his reactions have been justifiable. This quality of egotism gives the book a strident tone at times, which confirms what he is saying about himself; that is, Wright is not a sociable person, but a critical observer who alienates others by his moral position.

Given the circumstances of his life, Richard the boy and Wright the author do in fact hold a justifiable position. Viewed as coldly as it is in Black Boy, society is invariably and simply wrong. Richard is not a deviant personality, but a natural product of his circumstances. This is what the book is telling us. Richard Wright is not going to soothe anyone's nerves.

If, therefore, the reader finds the tone of the book irritating, it is inevitable. The questions Wright is raising can only have answers that are serious and upsetting. These are the questions Richard has been asking himself from a very early age: why is my family disrupted? Why is Granny oppressive? Why do my friends and I have such limited futures? Why do white people set out to destroy me? What have I done as an individual to deserve this treatment from society? And how can I escape? Richard has to come to terms with his own personal history by escaping from the place where it endures. And he has to conceive of his past and write about it as if it were typical, in order to understand and answer those questions. This is his legacy for the future of black and white America