Use of Rhetorical Appeals and Diction in Richard Wright’s Autobiographical Work, Black Boy

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 his essay, Wright explains that the simple act of a black person writing was astounding to white Americans. Black artists were never taken seriously or treated with the same respect as white

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books.” –Richard Wright, Black Boy. The author suffered and lived through an isolated society, where books were the only option for him to escape the reality of the world. Wright wrote this fictionalized book about his childhood and adulthood to portray the dark and cruel civilization and to illustrate the difficulties that blacks had, living in a world run by whites.

Wright uses violent and fearful diction to inform the readers that conforming would result in physical or mental death. While thinking about the options he was in the South he said, “I could fight the southern whites […] If I fought

Sufferings of Blacks Richard Wright depicts the United States through many of his hardships that he went through in his youthful years in the early 20th century and how he has overcome them. In Wright’s Black Boy, Richard associates his hunger and oppression with the United States. He associates these things with the United States through his childhood history of starvation, abuse, and cruelty from the family and society around him that made his family become unsupportive and uncaring towards him. The aspects that he associates these things with the United States are racism and ignorance to his kind of people. Wright is trying to bring awareness to the American society of the kind of difficulties that he had and many others like him and

Richard Wright born in 1908 in Mississippi impoverished by his grandmother insisting he only reads the Bible. He became well known for an excerpt from his autobiography Black Boy entitled Fighting Words. In fighting Wright describes the moment he became interested in the use of descriptive words. He begins with his trip to the bank where he stumbled upon a magazine with a editorial piece describing H.L. Mencken as a fool. Immediately Wright knew that Mencken had to be advocating about the thing going on in the south. That is the only way he would be receiving this kind of attention. This intrigued Wright, he had to have Mencken book. But how blacks were not allowed to check out book from the library. Wright had gone

Richard Wright, in his memoir, Black Boy, tells of the consequences and challenges he faced in growing up in the early 20th century South. He narrates the story of his difficult childhood, riddled with violence, prejudice, and hunger, both mental and physical. Throughout his autobiography, Wright discusses his difficulties being raised in a bigoted, ignorant world; he writes of his journey to reach manhood. He uses reading and writing to take on the helplessness and isolation he faces as a result of attempting to survive in a racist, oppressive society. Over the course of the memoir, Wright learns that attempting to enact change through literature is the only way he can live through the darkness because of the inefficacy of community interaction.

Dave and his parents speak with an almost slurring drawl, dropping letters and syllables from their words, in contrast to the white-skinned Joe and Mr. Hawkins, who use more standard English. Although Wright’s use of dialect often makes reading the story difficult, dialect gives the character’s vitality and dimension. Readers can actually visualize Mrs. Saunders chastising Dave, for example, when she exclaims, “Lawd, chil, whut’s wrong wid yuh?” (Wright). Integrating different dialects into the story also lends a ring of authenticity to Wright’s portrayal of a rural southern community in the early twentieth century, a community in which whites and blacks coexist on unequal terms.

In the autobiography, Black Boy, by Richard Wright, he talks about his struggles growing up because of his skin color. His book starts off with his childhood. At the age of four, not knowing any better, Richard accidentally burned his house down when his grandmother was lying on the bed ill. After this incident, they moved from Natchez, Mississippi, to Memphis Tennessee. In Memphis, they lived in a one-story brick tenement that looked bleak and hostile.

For example, in perhaps his greatest works, Native Son and Black Boy, Wright displayed the social tension and division between white and black people during the time of his youth. At times he portrayed whites as those who could do no right and continually abused blacks. The protagonist in Native Son is seen as one bound by the limitations in his society and seemingly confirming whites’ worst fears about black people. Along with racial maltreatment and segregation, the next influential factor on Wright’s life was that he grew up with a terribly inconsistent and unstable family situation and dynamic. At age six, his father left his family and they would not see each other again for over twenty-five years.

When talking about his life lessons that he learned they all had something in common. Whites feeling the need to teach a “negro” a lesson. Whites liked to think that just because of racial formations that whatever they did was okay because they were inferior to blacks. Jim Crow Law brought the segregation of blacks and whites, along with the saying “separate but Equal”. When Mr. Wright first notices that he is black started with his mother. He thinks that she will show him nothing but empathy with his fights with the white boys. Then instead his mother tells him that he is lucky to even be alive. The society that the whites constructed made it so that if a black man didn’t answer with a properly announced sir, the white man would assault him. Since the blacks were to incompetent in the whites’ eyes. Which goes back to whites thinking that they have to teach the blacks a

“It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.” (Adler) Richard Wright shared his life story in his novel Black Boy. By doing this Wright has created a primary source about the abuse and mistreatment of blacks in the Jim Crow south. His stories are not only award winning, but also shows what truly happened and to what extents the whites would go to keep the blacks repressed. Throughout all of the hardships that Wright faced, he always kept fighting. This idea of fighting is a reoccurring theme throughout this whole novel and almost appears to be a way to symbolize how Wright is fighting for his humanity, and the right to be equal. The whole story revolves around Wright going somewhere new and in turn having to fight to earn respect, or to just be welcome into the society. To truly understand what Wright is trying to achieve one must first ask themselves, what is being human. Wright views it as being able to act the same around both blacks and whites. To not have to hide how he truly feels and to be able to be genuine around others. Through Wright’s story Black Boy, one can see Wright grow up, but throughout the text, it is very obvious that fighting is

   "It is probably a mere accident that I never killed," Richard Wright commented offhandedly in an interview with Robert Moss (596).  After reading several of Wright's works, one can easily understand what Wright means by this statement.  In his books Black Boy, Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, and The Outsider, Wright suggests that white society has transformed black people into criminals.  The source of this claim comes from Wright's personal experiences as a Negro in the Deep South.  Whether pushed to crime from necessity or for personal fulfillment and self-realization, the protagonists of Wright's works are innocent criminals; they know

The famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, once said, “The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.”   Throughout history white men have been treating Africans and minorities with disrespect and hate. In the novels To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Othello by Shakespeare all show the white man's perspective on racism. Black Boy by Richard Wright is an autobiographical story which demonstrates how deep racism existed for African Americans living in the United States. Richard Wright shows the ugliness of racial discrimination from a black man’s perspective whereas the other three novels do not fully capture that. The differences are clear between Wright and Lee, Wright and Twain, and Wright and Shakespeare.

Wright has exposed the human predicaments of his individualism through his characters with their sufferings that they underwent due to their color, as well as he exposed the reality by bringing out the hidden pain of the blacks. The effects of alienation in a society can be noted through the novels of Wright such as, Black Boy and Native Son. In the novel Black Boy, Richard Wright had a constant feeling of alienation. Richard expresses his physical or emotional hunger, his disagreements with injustice, or his unwillingness to conform, he always felt this way. Racism plays a strong role in Wright’s Black Boy, due to the fact that this thought was very popular in this time period. Richard struggled to liberate himself from the alienation of white people and the working system because it was strongly looked down upon by whites and