Richard Wright's freedom: the existentialism of 'Uncle Tom's Children.'

It has always seemed comfortable to label the early fiction of Richard Wright as naturalistic. In his autobiography Black Boy, Wright himself acknowledged his debt to such writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Crane, and James T. Farrell. After immersing himself in their works, Wright commented:

I was overwhelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped for me the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them. (Black Boy, 219).

Indeed, if naturalism is to be understood as the philosophy in which humans are accorded no control over their destiny, and instead are simply pawns manipulated by hereditary and environmental forces, no wonder Wright identified with it. His own black experience seemed to confirm it. A victim of such socially deterministic forces as economic injustice, racism, and violence, Wright poured these experiences into his early writing, notably Uncle Tom's Children (1938) and Native Son (1940). In Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of short stories, the forces of a supreme white society conspire to keep blacks "in their place." As for Native Son, Wright described it as "the story of a boy born amid poverty and conditions of fear which eventually stopped his win and control and made him a reluctant killer" (Fabre, 65).

Since these books contained such a strong deterministic bent, critics were justifiably confused by the appearance of Wright's next novel, The Outsider (1953). Eagerly awaited, the novel tells the story of Cross Damon, a young black tom between his pregnant 15-year-old lover and an estranged wife who threatens to ruin his life. The opportunity to escape this nightmarish situation occurs when Damon is thought to have been killed accidentally by a subway train. When an old friend recognizes him, Damon is forced to kill him in order to preserve his own anonymity. The novel traces Damon's flight to New York, where he falls in math the Communist party, commits more murders, and is eventually killed.

The similarities between The Outsider and the earlier Native Son are many, such as the accidental death theme, the communist element, and the overall structure. What troubled or confused critics about The Outsider was Wright's conscious attempt to incorporate into it the ideas of existential philosophy. Existentialism, with its emphasis on the supremacy of the free will, the importance of the individual subjective experience and the essentially irrational character of existence, seemed to be the very opposite of the naturalistic determinism Wright had previously displayed.

By the mid-1940s, existentialism had come into vogue in American intellectual circles, spearheaded mainly by the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Wright, already familiar with earlier existentialists such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger, quickly immersed himself in these newer philosophers as well. Whether or not The Outsider is a successful marriage of existential philosophy and art remains a matter of debate. What is interesting to note, however, is Wright's reaction immediately after reading Sartre and Camus. "|Why!' he told a friend, |they are writing of things I have been thinking, writing and feeling all my life!" (Webb, 279). Indeed, even before his formal embrace of existentialism in the 1940s, Wright's fiction, so often viewed in deterministic terms, contained a strong existential note. Native Son has already been the subject of much critical discussion regarding this duality. What has not been discussed in any great depth, however, is the existential content in the stories of Uncle Tom's Children. Even in those early stories, freedom of the will and sanctity of the individual are used to counter the pessimism of the black person's fate in a deterministic world.

If Uncle Tom's Children is to be understood in both deterministic and existential terms, perhaps a brief recapitulation of that same argument regarding Native Son is in order first. General critical opinion seems to be that Native Son lends itself more readily to the demonstration of this duality. That Native Son is deterministic in many ways cannot be doubted, for as Wright says in his essay "How Bigger Was Born," …