Ideal of Social Justice
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Social justice is held up as an ideal by many writers, though they may not see it as something that can be achieved in reality. They may in fact see it as something that is thwarted in their society, and their point of view is dependent on their personal experience, the history of their era, and literary and social influences that affect their work. Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison for instance, are both black writers responding to the lesser position occupied by blacks in American society in their time, but they have somewhat different views of social justice as of other aspects of the black experience. Ellison's response is that there is no social justice and that there will not be. His hero withdraws from society and lives an underground existence as an invisible man. The hero of this novel is a black man who is invisible in white society because he is black, in black society because he takes on various expected roles accepted by white society, and to himself because he has been subsuming his real character in these roles and has not allowed himself to exist as a real person with his own point of view. His invisibility is partially a choice and partially a result of modern urban life, which mitigates against any social justice for the black man. Hurston agrees with Ellison that blacks are not given their due in American society, but she delves into an inner strength to take responsibility for her own actions and to assert a form of social justice as both des
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rasts the American tendency to celebrate the natural man with the European tendency to sublimate the individual to outmoded and unrealistic social codes, though Twain finds many such codes operating in the American setting as well.
Fitzgerald sees the more natural individual as yearning to join society and as failing to understand his or her own inner power in the face of a corrupt social system. Gatsby in The Great Gatsby is a man who wants to belong to a social system whose corruption he fails to perceive, and in the end he is destroyed as his illusions come up against the reality imposed by society. Nick Carraway is able to move between the two worlds, the world of the social order and the world of Gatsby, and to see the failure of both. He can no more escape the strictures of the prevailing social order than can Gatsby, but he is not a strong enough individual to be a challenge to that system, either. The social order destroys what it cannot control and rejects what does not fit with its narrow view of acceptable behavior. This is a society in flux after the wear, and as it seeks a unifying meaning, it rejects the power of the individual to find his or her own meaning.
Langston Hughes copes with the reality of race in
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Some common words found in the essay are:
James American, Ralph Ellison, Emily Dickinson, Huck Finn, TS Eliot, Langston Hughes, Nick Carraway, Goodman Brown, Allan Poe, , social justice, american hero, american society, inner strength, moral code, justice denied south, social system, possibility social, hero innocent, withdraws society, walt whitman, possibility social justice, social justice denied,
Approximate Word count = 1630
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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