Wright's Black Boy: A Narrative of Black Experience (original) (raw)

This paper attempts to analyze the depiction of black life in Richard Wright's Black Boy. It examines how socio-cultural circumstances create obstacles for Negroes and make black community suffer. Black Boy, which depicts extreme poverty and the writer's accounts of racial violence against the blacks, primarily is an attack on racist Southern white society. Utilizing the narrative inquiry approach, it concentrates on black American life and highlights the issues of racism and gender oppression. The conflict between the black and the white communities, the victimization of the blacks by the dominant whites, and the violence and bloodshed within the black communities have been the dominant themes in Wright's works. This paper claims that black American literature opposes racism and oppression in all ramifications to overcome the self-pride and self-identity of black race. The pursuit of identity is a continuous process where the potential aspects of the present and the past, of the individual and society, play a vital role.