The Street By Ann Petry Essay

Native Son by Richard Wright is about a black man, Bigger Thomas, who is becomes the chauffeur of the Daltons, a rich white family, and accidently kills the daughter, Mary. He attempts to cover his crime by putting the blame on someone else, but he is eventually caught and sentenced to death. Bigger deceives in an attempt avoid the consequences he knows the white world will deliver to him with and this deception contributes to Wright’s message of what racism does to the oppressed and additionally puts Wright’s communist party in a positive light.

In his most famous novel, Native Son, Richard Wright's female characters exist not as self-sufficient, but only in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them, such as their boyfriends, husbands, sons, fathers, and Bigger Thomas, the protagonists. Wright presents the women in Native Son as meaningless without a male counterpart, in which the women can not function as an independent character on their own. Although Wright depicts clearly the oppression of Blacks, he appears unconscious of creating female characters who regardless of race, are exploited and suppressed. Their sole purpose in the novel is to further the story by putting Bigger in new and more dangerous situations by

(E) The motif of the entire novel revolves around fire. Fire is used as a literal object as well as a

The novel “The Street” by Ann Petry demonstrates the relationship of Lutie Johnson and urban setting by personifying the wind, using imagery to show how brutal the wind was, selection of detail and figurative language in which refers to a deeper meaning of the wind-racial discrimination.

Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946) is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted the protagonist Lutie Johnson. Lutie is a single African American mother who lives in segregated America during the 1940’s. Throughout the novel, we see that during this time period Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis while in her pursuit of the American Dream for herself and her son Bub. Lutie is convinced that if she follows example of Benjamin Franklin, by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent and therefore be able to move out from the Street in which she is confined to. Benjamin Franklin is embodied in the text through the character Junto. It is Junto that is supposed to get Lutie closer towards her dream. However, Junto, through his secret manipulations tries to possess Lutie sexually, ultimately leading Lutie towards her path of destruction and she ends up committing the murder of Junto’s henchman, Boots. Junto represents the writer Petry’s deep disillusionment with this cultural myth of the so-called American dream. In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), The protagonist Bigger Thomas, is a 20-year-old African American youth who grew up in segregated America

Richard Wright’s “Native Son” Bigger shows us the short end of the stick of how it feels to be seen as a second-class citizen for being black. His speech talking about how he feels like a prisoner in this world just because he is black. (Wright P.17) This prison pain of Bigger in Wright’s novel shows how the negative effects of fear and discrimination affect minorities in our society. This discrimination just for existence is mirrored in the “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Color of Water”. In the Diary of Anne Frank, spends two years of her life in an attic with her family and other Jewish people, hiding from the government trying to capture them just because they are Jewish. In “The Color of Water” Ruth McBride describes how the KKK was a huge part of her hometown. That whenever a car full of white hoods drove past, any African Americans in the store would run home, Ruth did the same thing, knowing her family was also in danger. (McBride P.58)

Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946) is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted the protagonist Lutie Johnson. Lutie is a single African American mother who lives in segregated America during the 1940’s. Throughout the novel, we see that during this time period Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis while in her pursuit of the American Dream for herself and her son Bub. Lutie is convinced that if she follows the example of Benjamin Franklin, by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent and therefore be able to move out from the Street in which she is confined to. Benjamin Franklin is embodied in the text through the character Junto. It is Junto that is supposed to get Lutie closer towards her dream. However, Junto, through his secret manipulations tries to possess Lutie sexually, ultimately leading Lutie towards her path of destruction and she ends up committing the murder of Junto’s henchman, Boots. Junto represents the writer Petry’s deep disillusionment with this cultural myth of the so-called American dream. In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), The protagonist Bigger Thomas, is

Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the generic labels of “the man” and “the boy” affect the way you /readers relate to them?

In the battle of immigration, America is its own enemy. By abandoning and victimizing its refugee allies, America is no longer supporting its own. Anna Husarska has spent “two years of interviewing refugees"; with the notes that she gained through this process, her arguments concerning America’s ingratitude towards refugees are supported (90). In Husarska’s journal, “Exile Off Main Street: Refugees and America’s Ingratitude,” Husarska emphasizes how common America’s refugee abandonment is and the multiple temporary and rash reactions to the upset.

It is remarkable how differentiated works of literature can be so similar and yet so different, just by the way the authors choose to use select certain literary devices. Two different novels, Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, display these characteristics because of the ways the authors institute such mechanisms. Brave New World describes a futuristic era where humans are genetically manufactured for a certain job predestined to them before they are artificially created, and where common human emotions, desires, wants, and needs have all been modified to support a deemed utopian society where everyone lives and works together in harmony. The Road describes a post-apocalyptic

Freedom Road is book written by the renowned novelist Howard Fast. Fast has written many novels including Citizen Tom Paine, Spartacus and April Morning. Fast’s career was a bit controversial because of his affiliation with the Communist Party USA and his time spent incarcerated because of this affiliation. This did not deter Fast from utilizing his creative abilities in writing novels. He wrote his most famous novel Spartacus while incarcerated. Howard Fast died on March12, 2003.

Shel Silverstein, the author of, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”, was a musician and poet known for writing children books such as, “The Giving Tree” (Shel Silverstein). He was born on September 25, 1930 and died on May 8, 1999 (Shel Silverstein). Throughout his life Mr.Silverstein, worked in many diverse occupations ranging from the military to becoming an author (Shel Silverstein). Because majority of his books and poems were for children, they (the books and poems) often incorporated positive imagery, metaphors, etc. In the poem, “Where The Sidewalk Ends”, Shel Silverstein uses imagery, shift, and personal pronouns to identify that adults must forget about the materialistic things in their lives to achieve a greater sense of happiness and joy.

arguably the best poem of all time. In just three short but powerful stanzas, Silverstein is able to

When analyzing Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright’s protagonist in the novel Native Son, one must take into consideration the development of his characterization. Being a poor twenty-year-old Black man in the south side of Chicago living with his family in a cramped one- bedroom apartment in the 1930’s, the odds of him prospering in life were not in his favor. Filled with oppression, violence, and tragedy, Bigger Thomas’ life was doomed from the moment he was born. Through the novel, Bigger divulges his own dreams to provide for his family and to be anything but a “nobody.” Although Bigger struggled to fight through obstacles to pursue his dreams for the future, his chase for a better life came to an abrupt

Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, depicts the life of the general black community in Chicago during the 1930’s. Though African Americans had been freed from slavery, they were still burdened with financial and social oppression. Forced to live in small, unclean quarters, eat foods on the verge of going bad, and pay entirely too much for both, these people struggled not to be pressured into a dangerous state of mind (Bryant). All the while, they are expected to act subserviently before their oppressors. These conditions rub many the wrong way, especially Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the story. Though everyone he is surrounded by is going through all the same things that he is, growing up poor and uneducated has made Bigger angry at the whole world. You can see this anger in everything he does, from his initial thoughts to his final actions. Because of this, Bigger Thomas almost seems destined to find trouble and meet a horrible fate. Wright uses these conventions of naturalism to develop Bigger’s view of the white community(). With all of these complications, Bigger begins to view all white people as an overwhelming force that drags him to his end. Wright pushes the readers into Bigger’s mind, thoroughly explaining Bigger’s personal decay. Even Wright himself says that Bigger is in fact a native son, just a “product of American culture and the violence and racism that suffuse it” (Wright).