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Theme Of Hunger In Richard Wright's 'Black Boy'

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One of the hungers that Richard goes through, is the hunger for learning and knowledge. In Black Boy, Wright describes his hunger for knowledge. After Ella, a young school teacher reads Blackbeard and his Seven Wives. Wright observes, “I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking almost painful excitement the story had given me…. I burned to read novels.” (Wright 40) Richard realizes that he is missing something in his life, because of the Jim Crow South, such as, for example, Granny’s religious suppressiveness that forces Richard to keep away from books, as she calls it “the devil’s work.” The poverty that surrounds Richard makes blacks neglect the whites, and when he reads, he falls into a fantasy dream world that doesn't exist in his life. After …show more content…

The hunger for connection and acceptance is another struggle and longing that Wright has to experience while living in the Jim Crow South. After Wright joins the Black Church, he says, “I longed to be among them, yet when with them I looked at them as if I were a million miles away.” (151) Richard longs for acceptance and a connection because when he was young, he doesn't understand the comprehensiveness of how the black community is not free and that they are ruled over the prejudice of whites in their own faction. Wright wants to be himself and let himself free, but the he cannot, because the Jim Crow South restricts him from doing so. But, after reading several novels, Wright states, “I now know what being a Negro meant… to feel that these were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach more than anything else, hurt, wounded me.” (250) Wright’s view as human being is very different than what he thinks they are, because in the south, blacks are looked down on, and he longs to understand

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