Realization

Blog – What is Wright’s realization at the end of the novel? Do you agree with it?

At the end of the book, Wright realizes two things: that we are all humans with hunger and that he, himself, needs to write. His last sentence, "I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human" combines both elements. The beginning of the sentence deals with his need to write. He says that he will write about the black struggle ("the darkness") and listen for the response ("the echo"). If he felt any response, then he would continue writing to create the "spark in the darkness". He finishes the sentence by explaining the purpose of his writing: to prove that blacks are just as human as whites. In fact, Wright's biggest realization is that both whites and blacks struggle with fear and uncertainty, but yet they both have a "hunger" to survive.

From a modern standpoint, it's hard not to look back and agree. I think we've made enough progress that we can recognize the truth in racial equality.

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Rising above oppression through humility. The oppressed people in each story have risen above what has restricted them - race and poverty and power. Not by flipping the cards, but by accepting what life (fate?) had resorted them to. In Black Boy, the masses of blacks seeking food among their neighbors has led them to feel tense and embarrassed. But, as Wright observed, they started talking, and soon they were coming together, eliminating their fears by accepting that, "their past had betrayed them". In Langston Hughes' case he seeks revenge on the whites who tell him they cannot eat with them. But not the kind of revenge you would think. They say the best revenge is living well, and that is what Hughes seeks. Putting their pasts to rest is what causes the blacks in the relief station line and Langston Hughes to progress.

Poles

Blog – Do you agree with Wright’s theory that artists and politicians stand at opposite poles?

I do not agree that artists and politicians stand at opposite poles. In fact, artists and politicians can have a mutual relationship. For example, this poster of Uncle Sam is an example of the relationship that art and politics can have. And art can assist a political group in rebellion of another political group, such as this picture glorifying the United States in the Revolutionary War. Art can be used for propaganda. Art can be whatever the artist wants to make it. The only way I can imagine art being on the opposite pole of politics is if it portrayed some kind of natural anarchy.

(parenthesis)

Blog – Even more so than in Part I, Wright the author – not Wright the person in the text – is speaking to us through these passages in parenthesis. Pick such a passage from this chapter and comment.

On page 265, Wright writes, "(It was not until I had left the delicatessen job that I saw how grossly I had misread the motives and attitudes of Mr. Hoffman and his wife. I had not yet learned anything that would have helped me to thread my way through these perplexing racial relations. Accepting my environment at its face value, trapped by my own emotions, I kept asking myself what had black people done to bring this crazy world upon them?

In this passage, Wright offers a reflection upon his first job in Chicago. He shares that he did not trust the Hoffmans, a fact that seems to burden yet reason with him. As he points out in this passage, and many others, he did not know who to trust. He was fresh out of Memphis, where no black man would ever trust a white person. Wright barely even trusted any blacks in Memphis. So it is not surprising that even though he hoped Chicago would free him from the racial tensions of the south, he was overly cautious. At the end of this passage he poses a rhetorical question that not only applies to the specific scenario of his mistrust, but to the whole book and his life. In the book, Wright is a character who cannot get past his own questions about unfairness. One would assume that this is not unlike the author Wright. This question further shows his unsettled, unique disturbance at racial injustice. His disturbance is not rare, for it was no doubt felt by many other blacks, and even some whites, but it is unique because he does not accept it, eve though most blacks did. One can tell that the author Wright, sometime in the future, still has not accepted it.