Dissecting the Long Dream: The Revelation of Secrets on the Path to Manhood (Critical Essay)

TYREE TUCKER, the father of the central protagonist and arguably a dual focus of Richard Wright's novel The Long Dream, is a funeral director and owner of several brothels in the local black community. He is in the business of bodies. Bodies are mutilated, sold, lusted after, burned, and buried throughout the novel. Roughly a fourth of the way through, the central character of Rex (Fishbelly) Tucker is taken to his father's funeral parlor and forced to witness the autopsy of the body of Chris Sims, a friend of his who was killed and disfigured by a lynch mob. While this very graphic scene which depicts the bodily mutilation of Chris is one of the most discussed scenes in the novel, it is only one of many dissections in The Long Dream. The presence and pattern of these graphic scenes of bodily evisceration and dissection, three literal and at least two symbolic, are essential for the development of the character of Fishbelly. The repeated dissections/eviscerations, throughout the novel represent the need for the main character to look beneath the visibly apparent for the secrets and inner workings of society, black masculinity, and family to help him establish his own agency and realize autonomous selfhood. The relevance of the dissection of bodies and the revelations of the secrets that can come from dissection is established early. In the opening pages of the novel, seven-year-old Rex anxiously awaits his father's return from a nighttime fishing trip. He is excited and curious, for his only understanding of a fish is what he has seen in his childhood picture books, a one-dimensional figure that appears to Rex to be seven feet tall (10). The one-dimensionality of the fish in the picture book denies the possibility of dissection and comprehension for Fishbelly. Before his mother kills the fish, his mother and father encourage him to examine it thoroughly. Rex is employing his senses in an inquisitive manner and using his deductive skills to understand better the object before him. He learns what he can from the fish on the outside. He then watches his mother "take up a knife, scrape scales, whack fins, then slit the fish down its side" groping "inside the fish's white belly and [drawing] forth a small batch of entrails" for her son to examine (12). The inner workings of the fish are revealed, the secret inner workings of a living being are laid out in front of the young boy. His father then teaches his son how to make a balloon out of the fish's bladder, an action that fascinates and excites Rex and provides him an intimate interaction with the inner workings of the fish. This scene is obviously important for it explains Rex's nickname, Fishbelly; however, I argue that it has greater significance; this scene starts a pattern of dissections that figure into the maturation of the main character.