A Portrait of the Artist as a Black Boy

Abstract

Richard Wright's Black Boy has long been recognized as one of the classics of protest literature because it exposes the negative impact of a racist environment upon the development of the human personality on even the most basic levels of physical and social maturation. This theme of the autobiographical Black Boy has a corollary, namely, that such a racist environment almost inevitably precludes the development of the human personality on the higher planes of existence, such as the intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic, because it forces the individual to concentrate his full energies upon the task of merely surviving. Wright had originally entitled his autobiography American Hunger, a title which better focused the multi-level nature of Richard's quest for selfactualization in the midst of an overwhelmingly hostile environment. Most obvious is the connection between that environment and Richard's struggle for the bare essentials of subsistence food, clothing, shelter, friendship, and security. But unlike Shorty and Griggs, who have been stunted by that environment and emerge in Black Boy as individuals concerned entirely with the bare essentials of physical survival, Richard constantly struggles to transcend the limitations of that environment. Wright presents the young Richard as an individual driven to seek out the grand design of life, at first as a means of understanding his peculiar personal circumstances and experience, and, by the story's end, as the basis for an artistic vision which will serve him in his struggle to become an artist. As in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, to which Black Boy owes much, imagination plays a key role in young Richard's relationship to external reality. From the very outset of Black Boy, Wright endows Richard with an active and fertile imagination that gradually creates in the hero an organic awareness that life's possibilities are not limited to the bleakness of the reality in which he lives. More specifically, in Wright's controlled description of life in the South, environment characteristically limits Richard's experience in almost every incident to the negative dimensions of boredom, hunger, anger, and hatred, all of which are barriers to experience of a positive nature. Imagination becomes Richard's only tool or weapon for wresting from such an environment experiences which could be characterized as positive and healthy.