And it is only after he reaches New York and finds at a graveyard the name of a dead man of similar age, that he becomes Lionel Lane. He then obtains Lane's birth certificate and a draft card and almost overnight resurrects Lionel Lane in his own image (Paquet, 2001 p
Wright, of course, had always conceived of the novel as a means of working out his ideas. "Writing," he told William Gardner Smith in 1953, "would always be a way of thinking aloud over issues; posing the problems and the questions as to their solution posing them only, not answering them" (Robison, 2003 p
Houston tells him he has investigated his background and has discovered his true identity. He also tells him he has deduced Cross to be the murderer; his evidence is only psychological, but he is convinced that only someone of Cross's intellectual and philosophical orientation could have committed these crimes (Rowley, 2001 p
Cross suddenly realizes that inasmuch as everyone thinks him dead, he can begin life anew with no obligations. He hides for a while in a brothel-hotel to make sure that no one suspects he is still alive, and there, ironically, discovers a fellow postal worker who had attended his funeral (Shankar, 2004)
Early in the novel Cross finds himself in conflict with the Communist Party; not because he is so different from other Communists, but because he is so much like them. The Communists, he discovers, use idealism and ideology (Turner, 2003 p
11). Wright and Pessimism, Dread, Fear It should be clear from the above that The Outsider is that rare thing in contemporary American fiction, the "novel of ideas" (Tuhkanen, 2009 p
11). Wright and Pessimism, Dread, Fear It should be clear from the above that The Outsider is that rare thing in contemporary American fiction, the "novel of ideas" (Tuhkanen, 2009 p
When Cross reaches New York, he manages, after considerable effort and much ingenuity, to appropriate the name and identity of a Negro, Lionel Lane, who had just recently died. Later he meets Bob Hunter on the street who informs him that the railroad had fired him because of the incident on the dining car (Warren, 2007 p
34). Cross, in endeavoring to seek his freedom, finds himself capable of shedding all illusions regarding the true nature of "civilization," "morality," Christian "values," and human motivation; they are all in the final analysis man's inventions to conceal from himself the fierce libidinal impulses of his own nature and the senseless chaos of the world in which he exists (Widmer, 2003 p
Man is his own God, dependent on his own volition. Sartre makes much of these ideas in his book, What Is Literature? The most revealing part of What Is Literature? is the section concerned with the art of fiction as practiced in accordance with the Existentialist philosophy (Winant, 2001 p
.] All he could recall having heard about Communists was associated in his mind with darkness, old houses, people speaking in whispers, and trade unions on strike" (Wright 66)
Male run society provides one archetypal form of the ideal woman in order to mold this shapeless mass of humanity into a desirable quantity: "This arrangement suited the economic interests of the males; but it conformed also to their ontological and moral pretensions. Once the subject seeks to assert himself, the Other, who limits and denies him is none the less a necessity to him: he attains himself only through that reality which he is not, which is something other than himself," (De Beauvoir 139)
" Understanding this, it is relatively easy to understand how Wright and De Beauvoir came to be associated with one another in Paris. The philosophical position of De Beauvoir easily lends itself to the theme of racism; if existence precedes essence, then the reason Wright felt out of place was not because he physically was out of place in either the South, Jackson, or Chicago, but because his way of seeing the world was formulated by those who associated race with specific locations and social stations: "Once a person is in a landscape structured by racism, a conceptual mapping of race, of self and others, takes shape, following from and feeding they physical context," (Frankenberg 69)
" Doubtlessly, Black Boy is about structural racism and Wright's personal encounters with it, but the vital theme to take away from the book is that Wright has provided a model for, if not overcoming, at least coming to grips with racism. One critic writes, "Although Black Boy is strung with a series of episodes that illustrates various forms of racial oppression, the center of attention lies in our hero's transcendence of that oppression," (Hakutani 142)
Consequently, when we encounter individuals or groups who are in some respect atypical from what we have become accustomed to, we immediately identify these differences and react to them. Some have argued that in the Untied States these reactions fundamentally stem from our long tradition of capitalism and the free market economy: "As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate," (Lorde 281)
. If enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them, maybe, some day, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy," (Prescott 121)
. A conviction that the meaning of living came only when one was struggling to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering," (Wright 100)
S. foreign and domestic policies, and in fact never in his life wrote a "single sentence of unreserved praise for his mother country" (Fabre 177)
Fanon suggested that this mentality stayed with the people long after they were granted formal independence. Fanon wrote that all colonized peoples suffered from an "inferiority complex" especially when they assimilated into the metropolitan culture, while their own people distrust them for learning "to speak like a white man" (Fanon 5)
Fanon suggested that this mentality stayed with the people long after they were granted formal independence. Fanon wrote that all colonized peoples suffered from an "inferiority complex" especially when they assimilated into the metropolitan culture, while their own people distrust them for learning "to speak like a white man" (Fanon 5)