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1 results

  • Chapter 20 - Realism and Modernism, Solipsism and Solidarity

  • from Part III - Literary and Intellectual Contexts
  • Edited by Michael Nowlin, University of Victoria, British Columbia
  • Book:
    Richard Wright in Context
    Published online:
    08 July 2021
    Print publication:
    22 July 2021, pp 215-224

  • Summary

    Although it adopts and adapts both realism and naturalism, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) becomes, by Book Three (“Fate”), a modernist drama of consciousness. Native Son thus calls for a broad definition of the modern novel, one that reaches from Dostoevsky to Faulkner, includes Dreiser as well as Proust, and extends to Wright himself. Wright’s protagonist Bigger Thomas embodies the realist vision of the individual immersed in society and history as well as the modernist idea of alienation, for Bigger is both the doomed victim of forces beyond his control and the shaper of his own inner world of consciousness. By means of the tension between these perspectives, and by immersing the reader in Bigger’s internal quest for meaning at great length, Wright succeeds in crafting a novel that is modernist in its rejection of outmoded epistemologies yet eloquent on behalf of the voiceless.