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Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Comparing Richard Wrights Native Son and Black Boy :: comparison compare contrast essays
Critiques on Native Son and Black Boy                                                                               Bigger has no discernible relationship to himself, to his own            life, to his own people, nor to any, other people- in this respect,        perhaps, he is most American- and his force comes not from his             significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his               significance as the incarnation of a myth. It is remarkable that,          though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the            death cell, we know as little about him when this journey is ended         as we did when it began; and, what is even more remarkable, we know        almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe          created him.                                                                                -James Baldwin, "Many, Thousands Gone," reprinted in                      Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son, 1972       Native Son, though preserving some of the devices of the                 naturalistic novel, deviates sharply from its characteristic tone: a       tone Wright could not possibly have maintained and which, it may be,       no Negro novelist can really hold for long. Native Son is a work of        assault rather than withdrawal; the author yields himself in part to a     vision of nightmare. Bigger's cowering perception of the world becomes     the most vivid and authentic component of the book. Naturalism             pushed to an extreme turns here into something other than itself, a        kind of expressionist outburst, no longer a replica of the familiar        social world but a self-contained realm of grotesque emblems.                           -Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons," reprinted in                      Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Native Son, 1972      -                                                                            Throughout, the physical description that Wright rushes by us            makes us feel the emotional force of the objects but not see them with     any real accuracy: we are aware of the furnace and storm as poles of       the imagination- fire and ice- in a world of symbolic presences.           Continually the world is transformed into a kind of massive skull, and     the people are figments of that skull's imagination.                                            -Dan McCall, The Example of Richard Wright, 1969      -                                                                            ON MAX'S SPEECH                                                            But Max represents the type of so-called legal defense which the         Communist Party and the I.L.D. have been fighting, dating from             Scottsboro. Some of his speech is mystical, unconvincing, and              expresses the point of view held not by the Communists but by those        reformist betrayers who are being displaced by the Communists. He          accepts the idea that Negroes have a criminal psychology as the book      Â
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