Wright's Black Boy example essay topic

For centuries, literature has been seen as a form of escapism. Open a book; read an adventure. Find a new world with a book. Go on a vacation in your own living room; read a book. Modern-day libraries are coated like thick paint with such clich " es, on posters and flyers and librarian lips.

However, these clich " es cannot be found in "Writing and Reading", a short excerpt of Richard Wright's Black Boy. Wright, like many heavy literates, did not read as a young man to escape or to go on an adventure. He read to connect to reality. Before he happened upon the chance to read great literature, the "North symbolized to [Wright] all that [he] had not felt and seen" with "no relation whatever to what actually existed" (Wright 139).

He had read before, of course, but only pulp stories and "Get-Rich-Quick" series-and even to his "na " ive imagination" the possibilities presented in those works were "too remote" (Wright 139). As a young workingman, he lucked upon the illegal opportunity to rent books from the library. These literary works did in fact grant him an increased literacy and advanced wisdom. His desire to write became greater as well, but the idea of using the written word like a weapon frightened him (Wright 142). But more so, they gave him a bond with a reality he had yet to acknowledge in his "Jim Crow station in life" (Wright 144). Suddenly, he only had to read a book that had "spoken of how [white men] lived and thought" to identify himself with those characters and that book (Wright 143).

When he read his first "serious" novel, he abruptly saw his boss and identified him "as an American type" (Wright 143). The "vast distance separating [him] from the boss" depleted, making Wright feel "closer to him" (Wright 143). At one point, Wright even told the readers that "the plots and stories in the novels did not interest [him] so much as the point of view revealed" (143). He read so to "see and feel something different" of other human being, rather than of fantasy (Wright 143). Much like his sudden connection with his boss, other novels he read "revived... a vivid sense of [his] mother's suffering" that overwhelmed him (Wright 144). However, with this new tie to the rest of the human race-to other races, genders, and ages-his knowledge of his own life was also increased to a dangerous degree.

He knew the sorrowful oppression of a Negro's life suddenly (Wright 144). He had been able to "endure the hunger" and "live with hate" before, but feeling that "there were feelings denied" to him severely "wounded" him (Wright 144). The connections he had made with the rest of the world had showed him the hopelessness of his own existence. Therefore, books not only helped him identify with the others... but with himself as well. That kind of personal realization was considered dangerous in a Negro, at that time and place. This presented Wright with a problem.

He could "forget what [he] had read" and "thrust the whites out of [his] mind" (Wright 146). However, he "did not want others to violate [his] life", so how could he possibly lose the amount of dignity required to "voluntarily violate [himself]" (Wright 146)? Knowledge proved to Wright that it could, in fact, be a scary asset. He no longer "felt the world about [him] was hostile, killing" (Wright 144). He "knew it" (Wright 144). It is easy to say that reading is so enticing because it helps the reader escape.

The simplest reasoning has always been the preferable reasoning to many young adults. Yet... Wright proves that there is more to reading than turning into a peg-legged pirate or world-renowned baseball player. There is more to reading than running off on fictional endeavors. A good few years back, there was a child who was a loner and stayed within herself due to her undesirable home life. She would read book after book, but never to escape-why, she could play in the woods with her brothers if she wished to escape for a while.

No, she read books to relate to the world-to see the perspective of that young pretty blonde girl in her class with the exclusive self-made societies, of her chain-smoking teacher who had lost his two children in a custody battle, of those well-to-do boys that would scowl at her when she crossed their kickball field at recess. Wright has never been alone in his literary bonds with humanity. Perhaps, in fact, somebody he knew or would never know was connecting right back to him. A young girl, nor old withered man or any variant of the human persona, can never truly explain what she has derived from the novels she has read. She quite usually has no fantastic adventures or big new worlds to describe, but "nothing less than a sense of life itself" (Wright 144).

Bibliography

Wright, Richard. "Writing and Reading". The Little, Brown Reader. Ed. Marcia Stubbs and Sylvan Barnet. 8th ed. New York: Longman, 2000.135-146.