Theme Of Hunger In Richard Wright's Black Boy

Each and every person on this Earth today has an identity. Over the years, each individual creates their identity through past experiences, family, race, and many other factors. Race, which continues to cause problems in today’s world, places individuals into certain categories. Based on their race, people are designated to be part of a larger, or group identity instead of being viewed as a person with a unique identity. Throughout Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Richard is on a search for his true identity. Throughout Black Boy, one can see that Richard’s racial background assigns him with a certain identity or a certain way in which some

In Richard Wright’s novel, Black Boy, Richard is struggling to survive in a racist environment in the South. In his youth, Richard is vaguely aware of the differences between blacks and whites. He scarcely notices if a person is black or white, and views all people equally. As Richard grows older, he becomes more and more aware of how whites treat blacks, the social differences between the races, and how he is expected to act when in the presence of white people. Richard, with a rebellious nature, finds that he is torn between his need to be treated respectfully, with dignity and as an individual with value and his need to conform to the white rules of society for survival and acceptance.

   In the troubled world in which we live in, it is almost impossible not to find someone who is experiencing hunger in any one of its forms. Whether it is for food, for knowledge, or for love, hunger is everywhere and it mercilessly attacks anyone, young or old, black or white. In Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, Wright suffers hunger for love, hunger for knowledge, and hunger for what he believes is right.

He comes from an extremely religious family, and as someone who doesn't fully believe in the church, he is very much so isolated. However, the abusive way they try to push their religion on him leads to further isolation. When he was a young child, his grandmother and Aunt Addie tried to force him into trying to join the church in order to save him. At one point, they even forced him to spend an hour a day praying (120). However, Richard did not believe in the church;this would isolate him from the rest of the family. “They begged me so continuously to come to God that it was impossible for me to ignore them without wounding them. Desperately I tried to think of some way to say no without making them hate me” (116). Richard’s family want him to join their church, to the point where he is afraid that they will not love him if he says no. This feeling causes Richard to feel isolated from his family. This feeling is furthered when his mother joins in on the cause. In chapter 6, Richard’s mother tries to force him to join her Black Methodist Church. Richard, still feeling disillusioned with the church, is further isolated from his family due to this incident. “It was no longer a question of my believing in God; it was no longer a matter of whether I would steal or lie or murder; … If I refused, it meant that I did not love my mother, and no man in that tight little black community had ever been

“What is a rebel? A man who says no.” (Albert Camus, The Rebel) Black Boy is more than a mere autobiography, dealing with a man during the time of Jim Crow laws. Indeed, though the book is generally advertised as such, the greater theme here is not of the black man versus the white; it is of Richard’s fight against adversity, and the prevalent and constraining attitudes of not just his time, or the “White South”, but of the attitude of conformity throughout all time. Richard develops from birth to become a nonconformist; a rebel, and we can see this attitude throughout his whole life. As a child, he refuses to simply follow orders if they make no sense to him; for this, he is lashed repeatedly. As he grows older, he begins

Desires of all types plague the human mind constantly. Certain desires are obvious and necessary, such as food and water. Others are more unique to humanity, such as education, respect, and love. When something or someone seems to stand in the way of an important yearning, desire becomes hunger. Over the course of world history, minorities have been repeatedly denied some of their most basic desires. An example would be the treatment of African-Americans in the United States until the later twentieth century. In Black Boy, Richard Wright characterizes his own multi-faceted hunger that drove his life in rebellion throughout the novel.

There is plenty of figurative language in “Black Boy” by Richard Wright. However, hunger is used lots of times metaphorically in this novel. In the beginning of the novel when Richards father leaves life is hard on them and their mother has to work two jobs but she still does not have enough money to support Richard and his brother so they would starve when she was out working. Richard had to experience this type of hunger that no one should ever have to experience, this hunger would be standing by his bedside at night. Later in the novel Richard experiences a different type of hunger a hunger that made him desire

In the story, Richard had mentioned about the loss of his identity, his speaks of language and his family. We can see that when he said, “I did not know that I had a family, a history, a culture, a source of spirituality, a cosmology, or a traditional way of living. I had no awareness that I belonged somewhere. I grew up ashamed of my Native identity and the fact that I knew nothing about it”. This shows he was angry that there was no one tell him about where he belonged and his culture.

Richard then gloats over his success in a soliloquy stating how he has won her heart even though he is regarded by her as the devil with dissembling looks and he stabbed Edward her love just 3 months earlier. This highlights how he thinks of himself as the best as he brags about his misdeeds as though he is immortal.

Richard’s aspiration for power caused him to sacrifice his morals and loyalties in order to gain the throne of England. Shakespeare refers to the political instability of England, which is evident through the War of the Roses between the Yorks and Lancastrians fighting for the right to rule. In order to educate and entertain the audience of the instability of politics, Shakespeare poses Richard as a caricature of the Vice who is willing to do anything to get what he wants. As a result, the plans Richard executed were unethical, but done with pride and cunningness. Additionally, his physically crippled figure that was, “so lamely and unfashionable, that dogs bark at me as I halt by them,” reflects the deformity and corruption of his soul. The constant fauna imagery of Richard as the boar reflected his greedy nature and emphasises that he has lost his sense of humanity.

starts school, which he begins at a later age than other boys because his mother

In his short story “The Hunger Artist,” Franz Kafka illustrates this prideful individual, who strives to starve himself to a disturbing and gruesome extent, losing his humanity. Kafka uses symbolism in order to fully create this idea of an individual’s, in this case the starving artist, estrangement from society.

Wright’s inclusion of the term “American Hunger” in the title also makes a statement about the impact of race on American life in the early 1900s. Including it behind Black Boy in the title of the complete memoir (published in 1977) speaks to the fact that in many ways, “American Hunger” was synonymous

     Richard Wright's novel Black Boy is not only a story about one man's struggle to find freedom and intellectual happiness, it is a story about his discovery of language's inherent strengths and weaknesses. And the ways in which its power can separate one soul from another and one class from another. Throughout the novel, he moves from fear to respect, to abuse, to fear of language in a cycle of education which might be likened to a tumultuous love affair.

keep your mouth shut or the white folks Ôll get you too." As a teenager Wright