Both Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison provide us with autobiographical accounts of growing up in the era of racism and oppression characterized by segregation and Jim Crow. By presenting us with characterizations of their younger “I” from the perspective of their mature “I”, they allow us to see the anguish, abuse, and challenges of finding one’s identity in a racist and oppressive environment where one’s own race is viewed as vile and something to be scorned and ridiculed. We also see how in order to find themselves, the authors has to endure an arduous childhood filled with abuse and terror. Often social institutions on a legal, political, and educational level helped reinforce racial attitudes and prejudices, like Jim Crow laws. We also see how language itself is a means of defining a binary society where everyone not in the “good” (i.e. dominant) majority is defined as other and, therefore, “not good.” Through a comparison of language and characterization in Black Boy and Invisible Man, this analysis will demonstrate these concepts and others which threaten and present barriers to self-development.
In Richard Wright’s Black Boy, we are treated to Wright as a youth. The characterization of the narrator helps us understand the qualities of intellect and soul that are necessary for a black youth to find meaning in his life in racist American society. Yet, despite the ethics of Jim Crow, the abuses of being ostracized and viewed as inferior to whites, and other negative consequences of racism and prejudice, we see the narrator is the hero of this tale. He is an individual, who, even in his youth he is infected with the validity and certainty of his own principles and virtues. As a young man Wright was forced to be silent and as “invisible” when in the presence of whites as Ellison’s invisible man. Yet, even at this age he cannot tolerate the repression of racism and the degrading, inhumanity o...