Comparing Richard Wrights Native Son and Black Boy :: comparison compare contrast essays

Critiques on Native Son and faint Boy Bigger has no discernible kindred to himself, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any, other people- in this respect, perhaps, he is most American- and his force comes not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth. It is remarkable that, though we follow him step by step from the tenement room to the death cell, we know as little active him when this journey is ended as we did when it began and, what is even more remarkable, we know almost as little about the social dynamic which we are to believe created him. -James Baldwin, "Many, Thousands Gone," reprinted in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son, 1972   Native Son, though preserving some of the devices of the naturalistic novel, deviates sharply from its characteristic tone a tone Wright could not possibly require maintained and which, it may be, no Negro novelist can really hold for long . Native Son is a work of assault rather than withdrawal the write yields himself in part to a vision of nightmare. Biggers cowering perception of the world becomes the most vivid and authentic component of the book. Naturalism pushed to an extreme turns here into something other than itself, a kind of expressionist outburst, no longer a replica of the familiar social world but a self-contained realm of grotesque emblems. -Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons," reprinted in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Native Son, 1972 - Throughout, the physical description that Wright rushes by us makes us feel the emotional force of the objects but not see them with any real accuracy we are aware of the furnace and storm as poles of the imagination- fire and ice- in a world of symbolic presences. Continually the world is transformed into a kind of massive skull, and the people are figments of that skulls imagination. -Dan McCall, The Example of Richard Wright, 1969 - ON MAXS S PEECH But Max represents the type of so-called legal defense which the Communist society and the I.L.D. have been fighting, dating from Scottsboro. Some of his speech is mystical, unconvincing, and expresses the point of view held not by the Communists but by those reformist betrayers who are being displaced by the Communists. He accepts the idea that Negroes have a criminal psychology as the book