Richard's Hatred Towards His Father example essay topic

In Richard Wright's non-fiction novel Black Boy the main character, Richard, faces many problems that he must deal with. In this book the author writes about his life and hardships. The book starts off with Richard at the young age of four. Black Boy represents the deprivation Wright faces growing up. It shows poverty, hunger, lack of emotional support, miserable living conditions and Richard's response to these difficulties. Education and acquiring knowledge was a problem that Richard faced in the course of his life and which he emphasized heavily in this book.

He was a very curios boy that wanted to learn. He would look at the books of the kids in the neighborhood and ask them what the black print was. He would also question his mother until finally she sat down with him and they read together and he would ask about words. He was enrolled into school but since they were constantly moving he never went one year without his schooling have been broken.

At one point his teacher read to him from her novels and his grandmother scorned her and said that was the devils work. This didn't stop him. He would read novels and not even know enough words for what he was reading to make sense. His quest for literacy was one that he had to deal with alone. He didn't have much support from his family but he would not give up on furthering his education. The black white issue didn't affect Richard until later in his life when he started to acknowledge there was such an issue.

He wanted to be accepted into society and wanted to change the ways people treated the blacks of the south. He wanted to be equal with the whites and felt that knowledge would bring him closer to them and understand them and how they think. Richard's hatred towards his father posed a problem in his earlier life. He felt that his father was a stranger to him since he worked at night and slept during the daytime. He noticed his father's personality when they were living in a two-room apartment. Richard and his brother had to remain quiet while his father was sleeping.

Richard had a tendency to rebel against parental authority. One day him and his brother were playing with a kitten that lingered around the house and their father woke up and told them to either kill the cat or make it leave from the area. Richard decided to kill the cat because he felt if he did so he would not be punished without making his father risk his authority and if he were punished he would never give serious weight to the father's words again. This was a way that he could throw his criticism of his father being cruel into his face without being punished for it.

Richard's resentment for his father grew stronger after his father left them and they were hungry. Every time he was hungry he thought of his father and how much he disliked him. After a while he forgot about his father and later felt sorry for him when he seen him working on the plantation. All these events and triumphs have shaped Richard Wright's life into what it had become.