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Rhetorical Devices In Black Boy

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The pages 50-51 of Wright’s Black Boy, depict the reunion of Richard and his father, twenty five years after they had last seen each other. In this event the two are shown to be “forever strangers” (Wright 51), with the father now being a sharecropper in Mississippi. Wright uses tone, imagery, and characterization to portray the difference in character between the two, caused by the environments they lived in and the way society is structured. The way Wright describes the event in terms of tone is telling of how the experiences shaped their lives in different ways. Particular examples include the description of his consciousness as “greatly and violently altered”(Wright 50), describing how Richard’s experience with society had made him …show more content…

Examples of imagery include “I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers” (Wright 50). By presenting their faces as similar and related, Wright is able to establish a connection between the two, while also being able to continue describing them as separate in mind, and not truly related. Earlier in the text, Wright describes his father as “a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands” (Wright 50). The image of the father as a rugged sharecropper conflicts with the identity that Richard is later associated with, one of a writer who resides in the city. Instead of simply stating that the two live vastly different lives despite being related, Wright uses imagery to create this difference, allowing the reader to come to the conclusion on their …show more content…

The father is described as having “direct, animalistic impulses” (Wright 51), that “Joy was as unknown to him as was despair” (Wright 51). These descriptions characterize Richard’s father as having little emotion, which is implied to have been a result of the way he was treated by his landowners, shown by Wright stating “From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition”. To Richard, his father has been altered by the society around him, conditioned to work for those above him without issue. Characterization allows the reader to understand the personality of Richard’s father without ever meeting him, without ever using

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