On "Third Consciousness" in the Fiction of Richard Wright (Critical Essay)

RICHARD WRIGHT is well-known in the history of American literature for his protest fiction. An essential figure in the development of African American literature, influencing such authors as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Wright has been called one of the most powerful writers of the twentieth century. The central characters in his fiction are usually bitter, alienated black men, and his treatment of their experience provides a vivid portrayal of both the economic and psychological effects of racism. In his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the famous historian and essayist W.E.B. Du Bois points out that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line" (xxxi) and then he sums up the experiences of black Americans and advances the concept of the duality of the African-American identity, expressed in his related metaphor of "double-consciousness." African Americans are caught between the white and black cultures and forced into miserable living conditions. The concept of double-consciousness is used to describe the sorrowful psyche of American blacks in their life. Actually, Du Bois's theory of double-consciousness is reflected in the fiction of Wright. Du Bois reveals the racial circumstances and the problems existing in American society, while Wright illustrates Du Bois's theory in his fiction, points out the racial crisis in American society, and warns whites of the oncoming danger. Rather than the double-consciousness, which Du Bois speaks of as a double-edged attribute of black Americans, Wright develops a triple characteristic: his very strong sense of himself, his freedom to control that self, and his double awareness of the two cultural milieus in which that self has to exist. The American literary critic Eugene E. Miller mentions in his Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright that "His titanic impulse was to expropriate the three rather than to be expropriated by them. Only in his agony to shape these could his self be perpetuated" (xx). Hence, what Wright advocates here is to establish and maintain the self in black people's double-consciousness and thus he expands Du Bois's theory of twoness. Wright's concept of three-ness is conducive to black people's restoration of self-awareness in the conflicting process of double-consciousness. Apparently, Wright develops Du Bois's theory in his revelation of the tripartite division of a self facing two cultures. Du Bois claims that blacks have lost their "selves" in the assimilation of white culture both before and after Emancipation, but in his fiction Wright shows that some of the blacks in the early half of the twentieth century had attained their self-awareness in the process of acculturation. Hence, we argue that Wright's fiction not only reflects the double-consciousness of most black people, but also the triple-consciousness of some of the blacks.