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INTRODUCTION

African American Literature is the body of literature produced in the

United States by writers of African descent. The history of African

American Literature is as old and varied as the United States itself.

Beginning in the pre-Revolutionary War period, African American writers

have engaged in a creative dialogue with American letters. The result is a

literature rich in expressive subtlety and social insight, offering illuminating

assessments of American identities and history. The genre traces its origin

to the works of such late 18th

century writers as Phillis Wheatley and

Olaudah Equiano, reaching early high points with slave narratives and the

Harlem Renaissance, and continuing today with authors such as Toni

Morrison, Maya Angelou and Walter Mosley being ranked among the top

writers in the United States.

As African Americans` place in American society has changed over

the centuries, so, too, have the focus of African American Literature. Before

the American Civil War, African American literature primarily focused on

the issue of slavery, as indicated by the subgenre of slave narratives, journals

of personal experiences by slaves. They were a source of insight and

inspiration to readers. African American literature of the 1800s was

dominated by autobiographical works, culminating in Booker T.

Washington`s Up From Slavery at the turn of the century. During the

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American Civil Rights Movement, authors such as Richard Wright and

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about issues of racial segregation and black-

nationalism. African American literature in the United States reached an

artistic pinnacle in the period between World War I and World War II with

the Harlem Renaissance. Since then, African American writing has

embraced themes that range from the highly charged and socio-political to

private and introspective. The Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s

brought acclaim and prominence to many African American writers, and

fostered the growth of African American studies at numerous universities

around the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, African American writers were

working in every genre – from script writing to poetry – as they signed more

contracts with major publishing companies, and their works consistently

appeared on best seller lists. During the first decade of the twenty first

century, African American literature maintained the high level of visibility

established in the 1980s and 1990s. Black writers continued to explore a

diversity of genres as well as themes and to create critically acclaimed

works. Today, African American literature has become accepted as an

integral part of American literature, with books such as Roots: The Saga of

an American Family by Alex Haley, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and

Beloved by Toni Morrison achieving both best-selling and award-winning

status.

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African American literature constitutes a vital branch of the literature

of the African diaspora, with African American literature both being

influenced by the great African diasporic heritage and in turn influencing

African diasporic writings in many countries. African American literature

exists within the larger realm of post-colonial literature. But the scholars

draw a distinctive line between the two by stating that “African American

literature differs from most post-colonial literature in that it is written by

members of a minority community who reside within a nation of vast wealth

and economic power”. African American oral culture is rich in poetry,

including spirituals, African American gospel music, blues and rap. This

oral poetry also appears in the African American tradition of Christian

sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, cadence and alliteration.

African American literature has a strong tradition of incorporating all of

these forms of oral poetry. The themes and issues explored in African

American literature are the role of African Americans within the larger

American society, African American culture, racism, slavery and equality.

However, while these characteristics and themes exist on many levels

of African American literature, they are not the exclusive definition of the

genre and do not exist within all works within the genre. In addition, there

is resistance to using Western literary theory to analyse African American

literature. As Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the most important African

American literary scholars, once said, “My desire has been to allow the

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black tradition to speak for itself about its nature and various functions,

rather than to read it, or analyse it, in terms of literary theories borrowed

whole from other traditions, appropriated from without”.

In the Western World, distance from reality has been seen as an

inherent, problematic characteristic of art. Artists, in their attempts to justify

art, have dealt with this distance between art and reality in two basic ways.

Afro American culture has evolved in the midst of these aesthetic attitudes;

the older states the classical notion of art as artifice and the validity of

artifice because it reflects human involvement with an ultraphysical reality

and the newer stubbornly attempts to create an actual world in its own

image. Afro-American sympathies have been decidedly with the latter. In

Afro-American literature since the Civil War, the development has been in

the direction of a form or forms that deal as directly as possible with black

American life-physical, emotional, psychological – as it actually is, to put on

paper the very consciousness of black Americans.

This movement of Afro-American literature has been particularly

self-conscious for at least sixty-five years. Hughes “The Negro Artist and

the Racial Mountain” expressed the desire to bring art and life together;

Johnson “Preface to The Book of Negro Poetry, with its call for capturing the

special flavor more accurately by “symbols from within rather that by

symbols without” was in some ways an even clearer example. The Black

Aesthetic of the 1960s and early 1970s was only the most recent and the

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most explicit. In the 1980s, emerging theorists of Afro-American literature

are devoting their attention to what black American writers have long been

working towards. Afro-American artists and thinkers in the twentieth

century have taken increasingly to the idea that Euro-American languages

are not their own. These languages developed not from the Afro-American

experience but from and by a culture defining sensibility that had separated

their ancestors from their own cultures and denied them any language of

their own.

Richard Wright, a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright,

communist, agnostic and existentialist, was born on the Rucker Plantation,

an impoverished, rural environment in Natchez, Mississippi, on 4th

September 1908. He was the first of two sons to Ella Wilson, an elementary

school teacher and Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper.

In late 1912, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where

Nathaniel abandoned the family several months later and Ella took on a

series of menial jobs to support herself and her two sons. When she fell ill

in 1914, the six year old Richard Wright and the four year old brother were

placed in the temporary care of the Settlement House, a Methodist

orphanage for six months. In 1916, the boys were reunited with their

mother, who moved to Elaine, Arkansas, where she and her children stayed

with her sister Maggie Hoskins, whose husband, Silas Hoskins, who owned

a saloon. When Silas was murdered by whites so they could take over his

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business, Ella and Maggie and the two children fled to West Helena, where

they lived in fear in rented rooms for several weeks. In 1917, Mrs. Wright

took the family to Jackson, Mississippi for several months, but by the winter

of 1918 they had returned to West Helena. In 1919, Mrs. Wright suffered a

stroke, causing further family disintegration. Wright reluctantly chose to

live with his uncle Clark and Aunt Jody in Greenwood, Mississippi, where

he could be near his mother. But the restrictions placed on him by his aunt

and uncle brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown. The eleven year

old Richard constantly fought with his aunt Jody and his uncle Clark, until in

1920, they shipped him off to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with his

grandmother Margaret Wilson.

Wright lived with his maternal grandmother in Jackson from early

1920 until late 1925. During the five years he stayed in Jackson, Richard

began to attend school regularly for the first time in his life. Initially, he

went to a Seventh-Day Adventist School where his aunt Addie was the only

teacher, but in the fall of 1921, he enrolled in the fifth grade of the Jim Hill

Public School but was advanced to the sixth grade within two weeks. Two

years later he was transferred to the Smith Robinson School. In 1925 he

graduated from Smith as the Class Valedictorian. Determined not to be

called an Uncle Tom, he refused to deliver the assistant principal`s carefully

prepared valedictory address that would not offend the white school officials

and finally convinced the black administrators to let him read a

compromised version of what he had written. In September of the same

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year, Wright registered for mathematics, English and history courses at the

new Lanier High School in Jackson, but had to stop attending classes after a

few weeks of irregular attendance because he needed to earn money for

family expenses. His childhood din Memphis and Mississippi shaped his

lasting impression of American racism.

During the stay with his grandmother, Wright felt stifled by his aunt

and grandmother, who tried to force him to pray that he might find God. He

later threatened to leave home because Grandmother Wilson refused to

permit him to work on Saturdays, the Adventist Sabbath. Early strife with

his aunt and grandmother left him with a permanent, uncompromising

hostility toward religious solutions to everyday problems. At the age of

fifteen, while at Smith, Wright penned his first story, “The Voodoo of hell`s

Half – Acre”. It was published in Southern Register, a local black

newspaper. Unfortunately no copy of that story exists.

From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived Memphis, Tennessee, taking on

various jobs in order to make enough money to go north to Chicago. During

those two years in Memphis, Wright began to read literary magazines such

Harper`s the Atlantic Monthly and H.L. Mencken`s American Mercury. He

became fascinated with Mencken because Mencken attacked American

bigotry and used words as weapons. More importantly, Wright discovered

the novels of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser and could not read

enough of them. Reading those novels evoked in him glimpses of life`s

possibilities and confirmed his plans to go north and become a writer

himself.

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In 1927 Wright finally made his escape from the South and went to

Chicago. In Chicago Wright at first moved from one menial job to another

and finally secured employment as a postal clerk. While he was working in

the post office he read other writers and studied their styles during his time

off. When his job at the post office was eliminated by Hoover`s policies of

the Great Depression, he was forced to go on relief in 1931. In 1931 Wright

published a short story, “Superstition”, in Abbott`s Monthly Magazine. In

1932 he began attending meetings of the John Reed Club. As the club was

dominated by the Communist Party, Wright established a relationship with a

number of party members. He was made secretary of that literary

organization and especially interested in the literary contacts made at the

meetings Wright formally joined the Communist Party in the late 1933.

As a revolutionary poet he wrote numerous proletarian poems (“I

Have Seen Black hands”, “We of the Streets”, “Red Leaves of Red Books”)

for the newspaper the New Masses and other communist publications. The

best of these poems can be found in Michel Fabre book The World of

Richard Wright. A power struggle within the Chicago chapter of the John

Reed Club led to the dissolution of the club`s leadership. Wright was told

he had the support of the club`s party members if he was willing to join the

party. In 1935, Wright had completed his first novel. Cesspool, published as

Lawd Today (1963) and in January 1936 his story “Big Boy Leaves Home”

was accepted for publication in New Caravan. In February, Wright began

working with the National Negro Congress, and in April he chaired the

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South Side Writers` Group, whose membership included Arna Bontemps

and Margaret Walker. Wright submitted some of his critical essays and

poetry to the group of criticism and read aloud some of his short stories. In

1936, he was also revising Cesspool. Through the club, Wright edited Left

Front, a magazine that the Communist Party shut down in 1937, despite

Wright`s repeated protests. Throughout this period, Wright also contributed

to the New Masses magazine. While Wright was at first pleased by positive

relations with white Communists in Chicago, he was later humiliated in New

York City by some who rescinded an offer to find housing for Wright

because of his race. To make matters worse, some black communists

denounced the articulate, polished Wright as a bourgeois intellectual,

assuming he was well educated and overly assimilated into white society.

Wright`s insistence that young communist writers be given space to

cultivate their talents and his working relationship with black nationalist

communist led to a public falling out with the party and the leading African

American communist Buddy Nealson. Wright was threatened at knife point

by fellow traveler, coworkers, denounced as a Trotskyite in the street by

strikers and physically assaulted by former comrades when he tried to join

them during the 1936 May Day march.

Wright`s communist phase lasted until 1937, when he had a falling

out with the communist leadership in Chicago and left for New York. In an

essay entitled “I Tried to be a Communist” (1944), Wright describes the

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quarrel. The party bosses told Wright that they weren`t interested in his

writing because all he was doing was to “dramatize Negro nationalism”.

Instead they wanted to make him into a “mass leader.” When Wright

refused to obey the party`s orders, he was branded a “bourgeois degenerate”

and an “incipient Trotskyite,” and he was boldly thrown out of the

Communist ranks at the 1937 May Day Parade. Even after he left Chicago,

Wright still believed in the ideals of the Communist Party, but he could not

abide their “tactics of terror, threat, invective, intimidation, suspicion”.

In New York he forged new ties with Communist Party members

there after getting established. He worked on the WPA Writer`s Project

guidebook to the city, New York Panorama (1938), and wrote the book`s

essay on Harlem. Wight became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker. He

was happy that during his first year in New York all of his activities

involved writing of some kind. In the summer and fall he wrote over two

hundred articles for the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived literary

magazine New Challenge. The year was also a landmark for Wright because

he met and developed a friendship with Ralph Ellison that would last for

years, and he received an award of five hundred Dollars as first prize from

Story magazine for the best book-length manuscript by one of the 1,200

authors working of the Federal Writer`s Project for his short story “Fire and

Cloud.” After Wright received the Story magazine prize in early 1938, he

shelved his manuscript of Lawd Today and dismissed his literary agent, John

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Troustine. He hired Paul Reynolds, the well-known agent of Paul Laurence

Dunbar, to represent him. Meanwhile, the Story Press offered Harper all of

Wright`s prize-entry stories for a book, and Harper agreed to publish them.

Wright gained national attention for the collection of four short

stories titled Uncle Tom`s Children (1938). He based some stories on

lynching in the Deep South. The publication and favourable reception of

Uncle Tom`s Children improved Wright`s status with the Communist Party

and enabled him to establish a reasonable degree of financial stability. He

was appointed to the editorial board of New Masses and Granville Hicks,

prominent literary critic and Communist sympathizer, introduced him at

leftist teas in Boston. By May 6, 1938 excellent sales had provided him with

enough money to move to Harlem, where he began writing Native Son.

The collection also earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, which

allowed him to complete Native Son. It was published on March 1, 1940. It

turned out to be a phenomenal success, selling better than anything Harper

had published in twenty years: over 200, 000 copies in less than three weeks.

It also outsold John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath, which had been

published a year earlier. Praised extravagantly by most reviewers, Native

Son became an instant classic of American literature and made Richard

Wright internationally famous. It also made him a wealthy man. It was

selected by the Book of the Month Club as its first book by an African

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American author. The lead character, Bigger Thomas, represented the

limitations that society placed on African Americans as he could only gain

his own agency and self-knowledge by committing heinous acts.

Having suddenly become a man of substance, Richard Wright

decided to marry one of two white women he had been seeing, the dancer

Dimah Rose Meadman. However, during their honeymoon in Mexico,

Richard and Dimah found that they were incompatible, and they returned to

New York separately. Wright divorced Dimah and married Ellen Poplar,

who, like Wright himself, was a member of the communist Party. The

marriage turned out to be a happy one, and the couple had two daughters,

Julia and Rachel, born 1942 and 1949.

Wright was criticized for his works` concentration on violence. In

the case of Native Son, people complained that he portrayed a black man in

ways that seemed to confirm whites` worst fears. The period following

publication of Native Son was a busy for Wright. In July 1940 he went to

Chicago to do research for a book on African American history. The book

came out in 1941 and was entitled Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk

History of the Negro in America. While in Chicago he visited the American

Negro exhibition with Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Claude

McKay. He then went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he and Paul

Green collaborated on a dramatic version of Native Son. In January 1941,

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Wright received the prestigious Spingarn Medal for noteworthy achievement

by a black. Native Son opened on Broadway, with Orson Welles as director,

to generally favorable reviews in March 1941. Wright seized the

opportunity to popularize his social and political ideas by adding two pieces

that had previously appeared in communist publications, the essay “The

Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and a story that deals with racial conflict in

Marxist terms, “Bright and Morning Star”.

In 1943 Wright completed the manuscript of an autobiography, Black

Boy. It described his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his

clashes with Seventh day Adventist family, his troubles with white

employers and social isolation. American Hunger, published posthumously

in 1977, was originally intended as the second volume of Black Boy. The

Library of America edition restored it to that form. This book detailed

Wright`s involvement with the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party,

which he left in 1942. The book implied he left earlier, but his with drawl

was not made public until 1944. In the volumes` restored form, the diptych

structure compares the certainties and intolerance of organized communism,

the bourgeois books and condemned members, with similar qualities in

fundamentalist organized religion. Wright disapproved of the purges in the

Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Wright continued to believe in far-left

democratic solutions to political problems. In 1946 the French government

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invited Richard Wright and his family to visit France as guests of the French

State. Wright was overwhelmed by the cordial reception he received from

the French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir,

and a year later, he moved his family to Paris for good and became a French

citizen.

In Paris Wright got his sixth tow removed. He became friends with

Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His existentialist phase was depicted in

his second novel, The Outsider (1953) which described an African American

character`s involvement with the Communist Party in New York. He also

was friends with fellow expatriate writers Chester Himes and James

Baldwin, although the relationship with the later ended in acrimony after

Baldwin published his essay Everybody`s Protest Novel, in which he

criticized Wright`s stereotypical portrayal of Bigger Thomas. In 1954, he

published a minor novel, Savage Holiday. After becoming a French citizen

in 1947, Wright travelled through Europe, Asia and Africa. These

experiences were the basis of numerous nonfiction works. One was Black

Power, a commentary on the emerging nations of Africa.

In 1949, Wright contributed to the anti-communist anthology The

God That Failed; his essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three

years earlier and was derived from the unpublished portion of Black Boy.

He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected,

correctly suspecting that it had connections with CIA. The CIA and FBI had

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Wright under surveillance starting in 1943. Due to McCarthyism, Wright

was blacklisted by Hollywood movie studio executives in the 1950s, but, in

1950, starred as the teenager Bigger Thomas in an Argentinean film version

of Native Son. In 1955 Wright visited Indonesia for the Bandung

Conference and recorded his observations in The Color Curtain: A Report

on the Bandung Conference. Wright was upbeat about the possibilities

posed by this meeting between recently oppressed nations. Other works by

Wright included White Man, Listen!, a novel The Long Dream as well as a

collection of short stories, Eight Men. His works primarily dealt with the

poverty, anger and protests of northern and southern urban black Americans.

His agent, Paul Reynolds sent overwhelmingly negative criticism of

Wright`s four hundred page “Island of Hallucinations” manuscript in

February 1959. Despite that, in March Wright outlined a novel in which

Fish was to be liberated from his racial conditioning and become a

dominating character. By May 1959, Wright wanted to leave Paris and live

in London. He felt French politics had become increasingly submissive to

American pressure. The peaceful Parisian atmosphere he had enjoyed had

been shattered by quarrels and attacks instigated by enemies of the expatriate

black writers. On June 26th

1959, after a party marking the French

publication of White Man, Listen! Wright became ill, victim of a virulent

attack of amoebic dysentery probably contracted during his stay on the Gold

Coast. By November 1959 his wife had found a London apartment, but

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Wright`s illness and “four hassles in twelve days” with British immigration

officials ended his desire to live in England. On February 19, 1960 Wright

learned from Reynolds that the New York premiere of the stage adaptation

of The Long Dream received such bad reviews that the adapter, Ketti Frings,

had decided to cancel further performances. Meanwhile, Wright was

running into additional problems trying to get The Long Dream published in

France. These setbacks prevented his finishing revisions of Island of

Hallucinations, which he needed to get a commitment from Doubleday.

This great black writer not only helped change the face of American

fiction but he also helped pull the curtain down on Jim Crow. Everyone

should commemorate Wright because he defied all the odds. One hundred

years ago, he was born poor, black, the son of a sharecropper. In his

formative years, he was legally denied access to segregated Southern public

libraries. Raised in poverty and hunger, and barely educated in rural

Arkansas and Mississippi, Wright believed that "books are weapons." His

material spat in the face of indifference, forcing readers to acknowledge the

racist underside of the American dream.

In "Native Son," Wright's most famous literary creation, the young,

angry and impoverished Bigger Thomas accidentally kills a white woman,

flees the police and in the course of his flight kills again in cold blood.

Despite the ambiguities of his case, Thomas receives the death penalty.

"Native Son" and Wright's other classic, "Black Boy," remain on the

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required reading lists of many high schools and colleges because of the

power of their narrative. And Wright's themes of poverty, the stigma of

unequal education and the violence that poverty breeds are sadly still

relevant today, six decades after he wrote about them.

In June 1960, Wright recorded a series of discussions for French

radio dealing primarily with his books and literary career. He also covered

the racial situation in the United States and the world, and specifically

denounced American policy in Africa. In late September, to cover extra

expenses for his daughter Julia`s move from London to Paris to attend the

Sorbonne, Wright wrote blurbs for record jackets for Nicole Barclay,

director of the largest record company in Paris.

In spite of his financial straits, Wright refused to compromise his

principles. He declined to participate in a series of programs for Canadian

radio because he suspected American control. For the same reason, Wright

rejected an invitation from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to go to India

to speak at a conference in memory of Leo Tolstoy. Still interested in

literature, Wright helped Kyle Onstott get Mandingo published in France.

His last display of explosive energy occurred on November 8, 1960 in his

polemical lecture, “The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the

United States”, delivered to students and members of the American Church

in Paris. Wright argued that American society reduced the most militant

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members of the black community to slaves whenever they wanted to

question the racial status quo. He offered as proof the subversive attacks of

the Communists against Native Son and the quarrels which James Baldwin

and other authors sought with him.

Wright contracted Amoebic dysentery on a visit to Africa in 1957 and

despite various treatments, his health deteriorated over the next three years.

He died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He was interred in Le

Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

Wright`s literary achievement is exceptionally great. The black

writer prepared and nourished the ground for the fiction of social protest.

More than any other writer of his period, he helps in inserting a great

consciousness in Blacks and Whites as well. In these days of protest

writing, he acquires a new significance, he becomes for many Negroes a

symbol for the spontaneous creative impulses of the race. His novels are

outstanding examples in the fiction of social protest. They establish the

black artist`s reputation in America and other countries. His works belong

to the Afro-American tradition which includes a search for freedom, truth,

beauty, peace, human dignity and social justice.

Wright gives American literature its strongest statement of the

existential theme of alienated people defining themselves. Wright's use of

the black American as archetypal outsider gives his work a double edge. On

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the one hand, no American writer so carefully illuminates the black

experience in America: The ambivalence of black feeling, the hypocrisies of

the dominant culture, and the tension between them find concrete and

original manifestation in Wright's work, a manifestation at once revealing

and terrifying.

Wright`s works have a high quality of revelation and reflect the

writer`s persistent attempt to explore the actual inner life of Negroes. At the

same time, Wright exposes the social, educational and economical

restrictions as an attempt to show the objective reality of the American

society. Wright`s works constitute his own assault upon society. The stories

in his books are a brutal, startling and undisguised comment not on life but

on a way of having to live and being forced to live in ignorance, fear and

shame. The writer is thus preoccupied with the heroes who violently hurl

themselves against the walls that bar them from a life, they know is a better

life. The structure of their personality, the pattern of their emotions and the

type of their dreams are the measures of the author`s honesty and his self-

knowledge as a man. He performs his duty as a committed black intellectual

whose main mission is to unveil black life through action and writing.

Richard Wright is an example of black boy born to poor parents. He

has a great potential for genius. But he lives under the circumstances of a

racially divided and poverty-stricken Southland. His personality suffers

great trauma in his earliest and most formative years. The negative elements

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of the neurotic family and broken home in which there is religious

fanaticism and cruelty are mixed together to make out his fiction. The

misery of his youth and his early political commitment provides him with a

need for efficiency and motivates him to raise problems, suggested

possibilities and solutions. His life is dominated by a set of ideas and

philosophies that he personally embraces and then weaves into his writing.

Of great importance is the inclusion of existentialism in his body of ideas.

He seriously read Kierkegaard and studied Nietzsche. Wright further

adventures into the works of existentialist philosophers like Martin

Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre. Wright is obsessed with the psychology of

oppressed people and the creative depths of the unconscious mind. He

always reads philosophy from the materialist point of view and he accepts

Marxist theories of history, economics, politics and social class analysis.

Nonetheless, Wright is in the realistic tradition of Fyodor Dostoevsky. He

constantly tries to represent reality so intensely that characters, situations,

actions appear to transcend reality. His intellectual journey moves from

Southern black expression of Christianity to dialectical materialism and

hence to existentialism.

We need to understand this intellectual journey and how it relates to

all Wright`s works as a novelist committed to social movement of ideas.

Wright`s existentialism does not, as many believe, begin in Paris. It

develops as a result of his experiences. He turns against Christianity,

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orthodox religion at an early age because of the religious fanaticism in his

family. He grows up in a South, where every egregious forms of racism are

rampant, where the fate of a black boy is not only tenuous or nebulous, but

often one of doom. Living poor and black in a hostile white world gives him

his first knowledge of the human condition. He is deeply marked by the

existentialist vision of life he encountered in his childhood and adolescence,

which is compounded by painful poverty, the cruel religious fanaticism of

his maternal family and the frustration of a broken family. That is why, the

existentialist issue has been one of Wright`s major preoccupation.

In this respect, his novels Native Son and The Outsider and his

autobiography Black Boy attain a tremendous accuracy in the aim of

showing his existentialism. The author depicts his protagonists Bigger

Thomas and Cross Damon as the historical rebel and the metaphysical rebel.

Wright`s philosophy is that fundamentally, all men are potentially evil.

Every man is capable of murder or violence and has a natural propensity for

evil. Evil in nature and man are the same; nature is ambivalent, and man

may be naturally perverse and quixotic as nature. Human nature and human

society are determinants and being what he is man is merely a pawn caught

between the worlds of necessity and freedom. He is alone against the odds

of Nature, Chance, Fate and the vicissitudes of life. All that he has to use in

his defense and the direction of his existence are his reason and his will. By

the exercise of reason and will, he can operate for the little time he has to

live.

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The purpose of our work is to define existentialism and to show the

correlation between the writer and his work. As this work is based on

Native Son, The Outsider and Black Boy some existentialist characteristics

displayed by the heroes in the works are pointed out and the effectiveness of

their struggle is evaluated.

Our work is divided into three parts. The first part will be an account

of the basic elements of existentialism and it highlights the historical

evolution and the existential principles along with the introduction of

Richard Wright with his existential background. The second part includes

an analysis of Richard Wright`s two existentialist novels Native Son and The

Outsider and one autobiography Black Boy. The third part deals with the

assessment of Wright`s existentialism.

Existentialism is a term applied to a group of attitudes current in

philosophical, religious, artistic thought during and after World War II,

which emphasizes existence rather that essence. In its modern expression,

existentialism had its beginnings in the writings of the nineteenth century

Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. The German philosopher Martin

Heidegger is important in its formulation and the French essayist Jean Paul

Sartre has done most to give it its present form and popularity.

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was born at Copenhagen on 5th

May 1813,

into a family of seven children. Young Soren has been raised in an

atmosphere of austere rigid Protestantism during all his childhood. Without

being familiarized with religion, without any former preparation, the young

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boy is directly introduced to the harsh and authentic Christianism

exemplified by the image of Christ dying on the cross for our sins. After

that strange education, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Theology

in Copenhagen University. In October 1843, the Danish theologian

published Fear and Tremblement in which he spoke of Abraham and faith in

general. One year later, his meditations on the dogmatic question of sin

appeared under the title The Concept of Dread. Until his death in 1855, he

put down many other notes and philosophical reflections in his diary Papirer.

In term of Ontology or the branch of philosophy dealing with Being,

the precursor of existentialism defined man as a “synthesis of soul and body

led by the spirit” (Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 348)

“Man is spirit. But what is the spirit? The spirit is the self. What is the

self? The self is the relation to oneself or the possibility of that relationship

to refer to oneself… Man is a synthesis of unfinished and finished, or

temporal and eternal, of liberty and necessity, in brief a synthesis”. (Soren

Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 143)

In that vision, man is a being-in-relation and not a static substrate.

Ruman existence is therefore a synthesis of all these factors making man`s

nature. Existence is a perpetual relationship developed by the combinations

spirit-soul body, temporal – eternal, liberty – necessity. To say if more

clearly, man is nothing but his actions. The immediate consequence of

Kierkegaardian ontology is the personal commitment of the existing

individual in the human situation. Its significance is fact that we and things

30

“In general exist, but these things have no meaning for us except when we

create meaning through acting upon them. The existentialist`s point of

departure is the immediate sense of awareness that human beings have of

their situation; a part of this awareness is the sense they have of the

absurdity of the outer world. Life and death? What for? Kierkegaard will

declare all live, I live it in contradiction, for life is nothing but

contradiction”. (Soren Kierkegaard, Journal, 210) This contradiction

produces in them a discomfort, an anxiety in the face of human limitations

and a desire to invest experience with meaning by acting upon the world,

although efforts to act in a meaningless, absurd world lead to anguish,

greater loneliness and despair.

Criticizing Hegelian rationalism, the Danish theologian sees the

inadequacy of human reason to explain the enigma of the universe as the

basic philosophical question. He finds ultimate solution in faith: only a

transcendental Being can help us bear the absurdity of the world. He has

hope and faith because he believes in this ultimate Being as God, Love,

Oneness of immortal Mind, and infinite Spirit. By a leap of faith he finds

ultimate communion and existence in God, and this sustains him.

But during the last half of nineteenth century, the German

philosopher Friedriech Nietzsche substituting the traditional theocentrism

for a courageous anthropocentrism has proclaimed the death of God. He

used the term “nihilism” to designate the morbid crisis falling upon the

modern world: the collapse of values or decadence. As the existence turns

31

out to be worthless because of the nothingness of old values, it is up to man

to innovate and change those values. Man`s ability to transvaluate lays in

his awareness of the nothingness of old values. As a matter of fact,

Nietzsche claims that man is set free from God`s domination – gods do not

exist, or even if they exist, they do not care for man`s situation. God is an

illusion of the mind. Therefore, there is no reason to fear a dead God and

restrain one`s actions and freedom. The Nietzschean prototype is the

Superman. Nietzsche rejects metaphysical idealism as mere imagination, a

world of fiction which corresponds to our desire. The Will to power cannot

stand any idealism. The point of existentialism in Nietzchean philosophy is

his call for man to create values and invent his way layout good and bad.

In the early twentieth century, all those pre existential reflections will

be formulated into a system by another German philosopher Martin

Heidegger. The latter was born on 26th

September 1889 at Messkirch, a

small rural city in Badeland. By 1909 he passed his Abitur and registered

for The Faculty of Theology at Fribourg University. Four semesters later, he

decides to leave theological studies for philosophy in which he gets a Ph.D.

degree. After the first World War burst out in 1914, Martin Heidegger was

appointed as Assistant Professor at Fribourg University; during autumn

1916, he has worked under the authority of the famous phenomenologist

Edmund Husserl who will be his mentor and godfather his lifelong.

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By February 1927, the disciple of Husserl has published his main

work Being and Time in which he paves a new way for the transcendental

study of subjectivity. In that treatise, he uses Husserl`s phenomenology to

speculate in ontology and answer the fundamental questions.

“What is the being in general? What is it possible to know about the

being?” As can be seen, the main point in the Heideggerian system is the

question of being. To that question Heidegger answers that “time is the truth

of the being.” To put it more clearly, man is a being who exists in time a

temporal being who is perpetually a presence. Martin Heidegger`s

interpretation of the time as horizon of any comprehension of the being has

opened the door to the doctrine of existentialism in 1927. For the

existentialist thinker, man is a being in the world, whose existence is a

project, a being who can invent himself at any time of worry. Though we do

not sense it because of common habit, we usually invent ourselves when we

are worried in front of difficult situations and think out to find a solution. It

is within that little instant that man frees himself from his world and

discovers new avenues for his actions.

With such a freedom, man cannot remain as a mere subject in

History, but he can create his own history. To round off, Martin Heidegger

is the first philosopher who has tried a metaphysical approach of

existentialism. The description he made of human existence is all the more

33

pessimistic since he reveals to man the factitious and derelict nature of the

world as it is. It is up to man to create values out of that chaos. His

definition of man in early 1927: “the essence of the being lies in his

existence” announces the existential leit motiv: “existence precedes

essence”.

All the philosophies of existence trying to put the stress on the

unyielding nature of human existence will have special echo during the

Second World War period. When the war ended in May 1945, following the

capitulation of the German Army, we are still very far from the great

euphoria which has marked the end of the First World War in November

1918. The main reason is that the war aftermath is disastrous. As a matter

of fact, the European continent is devastated by bombing or air raids and

many cities are destroyed; the human loss is also considerable: fifty five

million dead for one hundred million wounded; the European economy is

finally ruined. Moreover, the events which have followed the end of the

War, in that year 1945, bring much more trouble than comfort, mainly the

discovery of concentration camps with their concerted system of

extermination by the Nazis. The explosion of the atomic bomb on

Hiroshima, even if it marks the last step of the War, will open the new age of

apocalyptic destruction, and engage humanity in a collective suicide. The

division of the world initiated by Joseph Stalin, Theodore Roosevelt, and

Winston Churchill at Yalta in 1945, creates not the conditions of a lasting

peace but rather opens the era of cold war. As Jean Paul Sartre said it: “The

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war has ended in indifference and anguish. Peace has not started yet”.

Henceforth, images of night and despair will haunt minds, so that a certain

conception of man, familiar to the humanist tradition, drops before such

revelations. The war period is one of chaos and pessimism and the collapse

of absolute values puts an end to man`s optimism about his destiny.

Even before the term existentialism has been broadly used, the French

philosopher Jean Paul Sartre has started his satire of contemporary

optimism. Playwright and essayist who bases his literary work on a

philosophical thought influenced by German phenomenologists like Karl

Jaspers, he makes remarkable beginnings with Nausea and a collection of

short stories The Wall.; those two works which are excellent testimonies

about the anguish of the pre-war periods, show some Sartirian metaphysical

themes: the feeling that everything becomes absurd in the light of death, the

impression of gratuity in front of events, the denunciation of bad faith in the

people who try to justify their existence by reassuring values, fear of a

humanism which believes in the universal man and not in the man in

situation. As a consequence, the tendency of laying the stress on absolute

values in literature has changed for a humanism based on man`s

responsibility and commitment into History. It is not necessary to ask

whether History has a meaning and if we can participate in it; but was we

are already living in the world, we must try to give it a meaning by doing

our best and struggle for it. The existentialist writers want to favour the

historical consciousness of their contemporary.

35

Jean Paul Sartre`s Nausea is a kind of metaphysical novel whose

main theme is that life means nothing if you don`t have a goal to achieve.

Written in the form of a diary kept by Antoine Roquentin, it narrates the

story of a man who is preparing a historical book on the eighteenth century

politician M. de Rollebon. From time to time, Antoine Roqentin gets the

sudden feeling of gratuity and absurdity of life, so he names that crisis

Nausea. He progressively discovers that the Nausea is a real metaphysical

aguish caused by the fact that everything that exists is irreducible to reason.

In the same vision, Albert Camus has published his novel The Stranger in

1942 and his treatise The Myty of Sisyphus in 1943 which are two images

of negation and absurdity. In the first work, the hero Meursault is a modest

clerk who denounces social conformism, discovers the absurd and engages

himself int a modern tragedy, all developed in a neutral and objective tone.

As far as The Myth of Sisyphus is concerned, Camus precises that the

notion of the absurd must not be a simple observation, but a tension and a

refusal like the revolt of the Greek king Sisyphus condemned to roll

continuously a rock up to the hill. Camus` conception of the absurd is the

opposition or the perpetual tension between human need of order and reason

the spectacle of disorder and injustice offered iry the world. In his Caligula

where the absurd becomes a raving anguish before the misfortune of

humanity, the mad emperor changed into a god will declare: “it is

impossible to understand destiny that is why I decide to be a destiny”.

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All those works render a new sound: the expression of despair is too

pathetic, the loneliness of the hero is too absolute, they don`t take part in

society which they denounce as absurd Roquentin in The Nausea, the

madman in The Wall, Meursault and his mythic double Sisyphus, Caligula

will never be fully integrated into society. They stress the necessity for each

man to invent his way and create himself his existence. Duties, laws

external to man, and any other maxim forced upon him lead to the

enslavement of the individual. Following that tradition, Simone de Beauvoir

published her first novel The Guest in 1943, another metaphysical novel

which dramatizes in an existential way the problem of individual

communication; the heroine Francoise kills her guest Xaviere out of

jealousy. In the same year, her friend Jean Paul Sartre expands the doctrine

of existentialism in a voluminous philosophical work Being and

Nothingness: man, born out nothing, can`t find any value that provides him

a goal to be achieved; he is an existence and has no essence, but instead of

finding despair in that nothingness, he must rather be aware of his freedom

and the importance of his acts which, once accomplished, will definitely

define him.

By 1945`s existentialism changes its first face of despair and negation

of universal values to become a doctrine open to hope and expectation.

During a conference he held in 1945, Sartre announces that “existentialism

is a humanism.” With its second face, existentialism turns on man`s effort

37

to create positive values in society, and therefore appears as the “hope of the

desperate”. The Plague by Albert Camus and the trilogy Strides Toward

Freedom by Jean Paul Sartre try to express through allegorical forms the

new humanism which refuses to shrink before historical catastrophes.

Issued from Kierkegaard`s meditations in the nineteenth century,

existentialism has found art and literature to be unusually effective methods

of expression. In the novels and plays by Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky,

Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Becket, Jean Paul Sartre to

name but a few, it has found the most persuasive media. To have a clear

idea of existentialist literature, which is the broad topic of our research

paper, it will be helpful to look for the main tenets or principles

characterising the doctrine of existentialism.

Etymologically, existentialism is derived from the adjective

“existential” to which is added the suffix “ism”. That very suffix “ism”

generally indicates the primacy of the preceding morpheme; individualism

gives priority to the individual and socialism gives priority to society.

Therefore, existentialism appears as a doctrine giving priority to existence.

But what is existence? It is difficult to give a precise answer, for existence

is not an attribute but the reality of all attributes; I am not tall, blond, smoker

and existing; but I am tall, blond, smoker only if I exist. We can grasp

existence in the existing individual not in the existence itself. Indeed,

existence is not a state of being, it is an act; the passage from possibility to

38

reality; to exist is to move from whit it is and to reach what is possible. A

concrete image of existence is available in Sartre`s Nausea (pages 165, 166)

where the hero Roquentin expresses some reflections on the root of a tree.

There are a number of guiding principles common to the doctrine of

existentialism.

First, existence precedes the essence – that phrase is the fundamental

motto of existentialism. Each thing has an essence and existence; essence is

what makes a thing, a whole of constant properties where as existence is a

certain presence in the world. Some people believe that essence comes first

and existence comes afterwards. That classical conception originates from

the religious tradition that God created man. Before creating man, God must

have an idea of the kind of being He wants to create; the essence first, then

the existence.

They believe that there is an essence common to every man, which is

called human nature, that essence determines man`s action. As the Greek

philosopher Plato said it in Phedon, the essences are the sources of the

beings; they preexist to the apparition of all the beings in the world, so

existence is the imitation of the original essence. In that perspective, man is

submitted to a strict determinism. For the doctrine of existentialism,

however, existence precedes essence, and essence will never join existence

except in death. If we take for example the object we make or manufacture,

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their conception precedes their realization. The artisan is inspired by the

concept of basket in order to make it; no artisan can produce a basket

without representing in his mind the image of a basket, without referring to

it. So the essence precedes the existence.

But there is a being in which the existence precedes the essence, a

being which exists before any concept; man. At the outset, man is nothing;

there is no human nature since there no God to conceive it. You cannot

define man at first; it is only through his actions that you know the type of

man he is. Man exists at first, arises, is found in the world, and is defined

afterward. Man is nothing more than what he does or makes of himself. In

human beings and only in human beings, existence precedes essence.

Therefore, existence is the privilege of man and not of the other

beings. Secondly, man chooses his essence. Not having distinguished the

universal essence that makes man in general from the individual essence that

makes a particular man, the doctrine of existentialism concludes that man

must create himself his own essence. It is true that I am a man, but which

type of man do I want to become? Even if I cannot choose a priori my

social class, my height and my intelligence, the attitude I adopt in front of

these contingencies depends on me. “each man decides of the sense of his

life, it is he who takes his conditions up to success or failure” (J-P Sartre,

Situations II, 27-28) I can be a disabled person from birth, but my infirmity

goes with the way I bear it; as “intolerable”, “humiliating”, “to be

40

concealed”, “to be disclosed to everyone”, “a reason of my pride”, “a

justification of my failures”, etc. The attitude I adopt my conditions

contributes to transform myself. I can be ugly or handsome, poor or rich,

these are factual data against which I have no power; however I can accept

or reject these essences. Life can have meaning and purpose if the

individual so will it by his own reason and determination.

It is then clear that man has freedom of choice in so far as his destiny

is concerned. Many people identifying themselves with public opinion or

using equally well the French pronoun “on” don`t have an authentic

existence. For Sartre, Karl Jaspers and Heidegger, the person who exists

authentically is the one who makes a fee choice, who can realize himself,

who is his own creation. “I want to count only on myself” said Daniel in

Sartre`s The Age of Reason. We have affirmed above that to exist is to

choose what you want to be. But it is not sufficient to have made a choice is

not all. Once your choice is made, you must not contend with it and stay

still. The existing individual who stabilizes himself on the type of man he

wants to become hardens and ceases to exist. It is not possible to fix oneself

on a definite position, for existence is a constant transcendence and a

continual overcoming. To exist is to choose to be more than you are. It is

important to observe that man is the only being who is able to choose; the

other beings are predetermined. For example, the seed preexists to the tree,

and all the transformations a tree will undergo through seasons are

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predictable. On the contrary, man can choose out of many facing

possibilities a particular when situation. It is only after his choice that you

know what he has really chosen and what the choice has made of him. The

only way I have to choose my essence is to adopt one particular attitude

instead of another in front of a situation. It is a choice which concerns my

own life and the life of the whole community altogether. Man constructs the

universal by choosing his essence and identifying his project with the project

of everyone.

The ways of man depend on his goals and his hierarchy of values.

Since our goals command our choices, the free choice of our goals leads to

the liberty of our particular resolutions. That freedom is all the more

safeguarded as our goals are never definitely achieved. In so far as we

continue to exist, we keep on choosing our goals, for freedom is the essence

of our existence. In the face of any occasion of choice we can call in

question our previous choice, so that any decision taken in conformity with

it can be considered as a renewal of that choice.

How are we going to choose our goals or aims? To choose between

honour and pleasure, between my interest and the interest of others, I need to

make discernment with a guiding principle. The Epicurean philosopher who

centers the goal of his life on pleasure, the altruist who sees no other reason

for living except devoting himself to his fellowmen, like the Christian who

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seeks nothing more than the “glory of God” pretend to link their moral

system to an imposing principle which has nothing with a personal free

choice. Anyhow, even if the principle of discernment is motivated, the

existentialists are not stopped by that perspective. Having rejected essences

and similar concepts, they logically come to the conclusion that even the

motive of our action is independent. Man adopts a particular attitude with no

good reason, he makes himself “without any point of support”, he goes by

no reason. Each person sets freely his norms of God, Evil and Beauty. Rene

Descartes had attributed that power to God, but Sartre and the existentialists

give it to man. “By attributing the free will to God, Descartes has given God

what is man`s prerogative”, he argued. That absolute liberty which invents

Reason and Good and has no other limits than itself is assumed by man. But

it is important to notice that the deep choice which determines our daily

decisions makes one thing with the consciousness we have of ourselves.

Moreover, that liberty is not the privilege of my willful actions alone. My

emotions and my passions are also independent. There is no privileged

phenomenon as far as my liberty is concerned. For example, my fear is

independent and it proves my freedom, for I have put all my liberty in my

fear and I have chosen to be fearful in such and such situations. Therefore,

everything in our psychological or interior life is liberty. To act freely is to

decide without any motive, but to set the motives as the goal or project of

our actions. That project is neither in Heaven nor on Earth but it is man

43

himself because he lives subjectively his project subjectively and is the

unique person who is able to know about it. If we consider the structure

“motive-intention-act goal”, the free will act is an absurd act. It is absurd

because it is not motivated; it is like an instinctive action and not a rational

one.

The absence of determinism justifies that man is totally free. He has

behind and before him no values, no justification or no excuse; he is alone

and condemned to be independent. He must search for ways and means to

survive in a hostile world where nothing is controlled. That is to say, man`s

existence is the constant exercise of his freedom, the perpetual effort to

surpass his situation. Man is always in a “suspended sentence” and his

survival depends on his efforts to face it. By a personal decision man can

reject his past, reinvent and reorient his life. In other words, man is what he

will be, he is not what he is; his actuality is provisory value to be surpassed.

Man is responsible for his actions. The existentialist`s responsibility

extends further than his actions he is responsible for every action happening

in the world. Nothing escapes his responsibility, neither his personal actions

nor the events exterior to him. For example, as a man I am responsible for

World War II even if I have not caused it. I am responsible for everything in

the sense that by posing free act, I assume the responsibility for everything

happening in the world. I have not asked my parents to give me birth, but

the attitude I adopt my birth shows that I have chosen to be born in a certain

44

sense. For example, through his lamentation on the dunghill: “why haven`t I

died in my mother`s womb” Job chooses to be born because if he had not

been born he couldn`t have moaned and damned his birthday. Likewise, I

cannot regret the war massacres if they have not happened, but by regretting

them I have taken them as a part of my existence and assumed them. What

happens to man or his fellowmen is surely human. No situation is inhuman

in so far as the most horrible situation, the worst torments never create

inhuman situation. It is only by fear, flight and other extreme emotions that

we consider a situation to be inhuman. The responsibility that the doctrine

of existentialism wants man to assume extends the common signification of

the word.

Ordinarily, we are responsible before God, society or our conscience

which are supposed to judge us. But in the existentialist perspective, there is

nothing of the sort; even if we do not willingly decide an action, we are

responsible for it. That responsibility is inexplicable, wantonly and absurd.

The universal character of that responsibility is contained in the fact that

man`s actions surpass him and belong to the whole humanity. That is why

we are always happy whenever any man accomplishes a famous progress for

humanity; we feel the same satisfaction like the author`s. In the same way,

when somebody does wrong we usually condemn the wrong doer and his

social class at the same time; we are also deeply affected when we hear

about genocide, massive killings, and certain abominations. It is important

45

to notice that the responsible man is the one who is invested with a mission;

he discharges it and considers it as an image of will. It is in that sense that

we understand someone who is engaged in a war and lives up to his decision

despite the critics of other people. He deserves it because he could have

shrunken back by committing suicide or deserting but, instead, he has

chosen that war and decided for its existence.

Man is anguished by his existence. That anguish results from the

immediate sense of meaninglessness that human beings have of their

situation. Indeed, the existing individual chooses his own norms without a

prior judgement of value. He is worried about his choice since it engages

the whole world. “Since man if flot but is made and by making himself he

assumes the responsibility of the entire human race, since there is neither

value nor moral given us a priori and for each choice we must decide alone

without any support or guide, why can`t we feel anxious about our

decisions? Each of our actions engages the destiny of the world and the

place of man in the universe. Why can`t we be seized by fear in front of such

an entire responsibility”. How can we justify the existentialist hypothesis of

anguish? Despite our good will, we cannot find satisfying answer to that

question. Previously to our choice, there is neither authority, imposing

upon us a choice nor a range of values offered for our choice. “I could do

what I wanted. Nobody has the right to advise me, there is no Good, no

Evil, except the ones that I invent myself”, protested Mathieu Delarue in

The Age of Reason. In these conditions, why shall I fear to make the wrong

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choice? Indeed, there is no justification of the existentialist anguish. Our

effort to discover the real cause of this “feeling of anguish” is vain: that

anguish is absurd and lays on nothing like the feeling of responsibility itself.

This anguish is absurd for the simple reason that the world itself is absurd

and meaningless.

Man engages himself through his actions. Engagement shows man`s

commitment into the world: once he takes a decision, he makes it his own,

and struggles for it. The existentialist tenet of engagement is opposed to the

attitude of immobilism, which requires man to accept his situation with

indifference. The existentialist approach of engagement goes beyond the

common engagement in politics or religion. In the passive sense,

engagement is the fact of being engaged and inserted into a system on which

one is dependent. For example, due to my birth I am engaged into the

world. In the active sense, engagement expresses the act of choosing a

situation that pleases us. For example, due to my birth I am engaged into the

world but I realize the second type of engagement by choosing to serve the

army or any other cause. In the real use of the word, both meanings go

together. We are passively engaged in the world, and because of that first

engagement we actively engage ourselves the situations in the world. It is

no use wondering why we must commit ourselves to a particular action,

provided that the engagement goes with a free will and is destined for the

wellbeing of mankind. Nothing greater is achieved, without a higher degree

of engagement.

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The feeling of absurdity is centered on the existentialist vision of the

world. Life, is life worth living? That fundamental question arises from the

“nausea” put into man by the median cal structure of the existence: “waking

up for hours at office, meal, sleeping and Monday Tuesday Wednesday

Thursday and Saturday on the same rhythm… One day comes when we ask

“why” and everything starts out of that weariness”. The discovery of the

absurd also arises from the queerness of the world, the hostility of nature in

which we feel strangers. Even our reason, acknowledging its incapacity to

understand the world, tells us that the world is absurd and irrational. The

absurd may also arise from the fact that each day of our life is stupidly

dependent on the following one, whereas time is our worst enemy.

It is the certitude of death, that elementary and definite side of human

adventure in the world which inspires us the absurdity of living. The real is

absurd and has no meaning for itself, that is why each one gives it the

meaning he wants. As a matter of fact, it is not the world itself which is

absurd but it is the comparison of its irrational nature with man`s desire of

clarity. The absurd is neither in man nor in the world, but in their common

presence or antagonism.

Since the drama of absurdity makes one with human existence, any

solution for that problem must preserve the notion of absurd. That is why,

the doctrine of existentialism challenges all the solutions skipping then

absurdity of the world, mainly suicide and religion. In fact, committing

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suicide is an easy way to suppress the consciousness of the absurd, and

religion places outside the world the hopes and expectations that would give

sense to life. On the contrary, the existentialists want man to live only with

what he knows that is the consciousness of the confrontation between his

mind and the world. The existentialist faces the world and challenges the

absurdity of his situation: he accepts his destiny entirely. For Albert Camus,

the prototype of the absurd man is Sisyphus: the gods have condemned him

to roll a rock up to a mountain top from where the heavy stone will fall

down again; by being aware of the vanity of his efforts, Sisyphus rises above

his punishment; by accepting his destiny Sisyphus bases his grandeur on the

struggle. The absurd hero is happy. As can be seen, the awareness of the

absurd leads to independence.

The doctrine of existentialism is a humanism. Criticizing the

traditional form of humanism which takes man as purpose and absolute

value, the existentialists oppose a humanism based on human dignity. In

that vision, man is concerned with the farthest events as well as the nearest

ones, the individual actions as well as collective dramas for he is entirely

responsible for the whole world. He has the heavy responsibility to realize a

more human universe. That humanism is built on the notion that man is the

only being capable of altruism, of pure love above the restrictive sphere of

instinctive, familial, an d sexual affection. The existential view can assert

the possibility of improvement. Most pessimistic systems find the source of

their despair in the fixed imperfections of human nature or the human

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context; the existentialist, however, denies all absolute principles and holds

that human nature is fixed only in that we have agreed to recognize certain

human attributes; it is therefore subject to change if human beings can hope

for aid in making such alterations only from within themselves. Man is the

future of man. It is not longer possible to conceive humanity as a great

being into which the plurality of individuals would be melted and be

restored, because the tranhistorical dimension of man enables him to mark

the existence with his imprints. The existentialist humanism will be realized

only when each man becomes conscious that his existence depends on

himself and on the others.

“Each one is alone and nobody can go without the others, there is not

common life which releases us of the burden of ourselves and spares us to

have an opinion. And there is no interior life which can`t be a first attempt

of our relations with the others” In the Plague by Albert Camus, the

characters learn the necessity of solidarity in the face of a common

epidemic. The novel shows that man can`t survive alone and that his destiny

is linked to the others. Since he admits that life is absurd and unjust, it is up

to him to give it a meaning and create a little justice: “what balance the

absurd is the community of men struggling against it” said Camus in 1945.

The atheistic existentialists do not conceive any God transcending

human existence. Their main argument is the contradicting notion of a

Being which exists by itself or causa sui: to build its own existence. He

must have existed before, which is obviously contradictory. Moreover, there

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is a relation between the existence of God and that of man: the existence of

one excludes the existence of the other, and vice versa. If God exists, man is

not free; but it is in the essence of man to be free, therefore God does not

exist. Subsequently, the existing individual takes the place of the presumed

God for he is the only creator of values in the universe. “Since one

suppresses God the Father, there must be somebody to invent the values…”

observed Sartre. The non existence of God is the logical consequence of the

existence of man; which reminds us of Nietzsche`s “God is dead”. The

negation of the existence of God leads to a radical individualism. However,

the doctrine of existentialism does not kill God in the way of vulgar atheists:

they do not reject God for the pleasure of it. They evacuate God from the

world just to let man takes the responsibility for his destiny. In other words,

if the belief in God is to threaten man`s freedom, He cannot exist; if the

existence of God must be prior to the existence of man, He cannot exist.

Their exclusion of God leads to man`s responsibility to bear the heavy role

of the creator. Having rejected the existence of God, the doctrine

existentialism also rejects guiding principles, systems, ideologies, and any

morel exterior to man; their slogan is “No God, no master”

Richard Wright`s novels Native Son and The Outsider and his

autobiography Black Boy illustrate that existentialist vision of life in the

particular context of his time and society.