Daniel Charlton

Daniel Charlton (he/him) is currently an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology and English methods for pre-service teachers. He completed his Master’s from the Johns Hopkins University and is pursuing his Ph.D. in American Studies. Daniel’s research synthesizes literary theory and criticism, the history of the novel, and American Naturalism in order to make interventions into previously conceptualized notions of hegemony, masculinity, and consumerist culture(s). Daniel’s other projects include film, popular culture, and exploring widespread literary culture and popularity as it relates to domestic and international trends, and he is completing research on “the quiet” novel.

From Reflection to Revolution:
The Protestations of Richard Wright and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eludes us then, but that’s not matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.[1]

I. INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Though the circumstances, socio-historical concerns, and racial identities found in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby and Richard Wright’s quasi-autobiography Black Boy may appear at once disparate from one another, they both contend with similar aspects that connect and synthesize America’s issues, reflective of the past and remarking on the present. Racially, the two novels expound upon the difficulties and the ever-present plight of the marginalized, whether socially or economically; however, they both handle the intersections of human life in drastically different manners and critical approaches. As the subtitle of Wright’s novel American Hunger: A Record of Childhood and Youth, Fitzgerald and Wright utilize moments of hunger in which to bring about a conceptualized—if not fully abstract—hunger for change: hunger for a better circumstance or at least a different environment than the characters respectively inhabit. Not merely a motif, such hunger envelops much of the desires that trace its historiographical and literary concerns as protest literature. Protest, much akin to hunger itself, integrates the need for social change and achieves, or at least attempts to achieve, a semblance of it in a conducive manner to incite others to take an indelibly vital role in its lasting success or potential legacy. Altogether, while certainly dissimilar in several ways, beliefs, and vantage points, The Great Gatsby and Black Boy participate in the literary tradition of protestation, power, and the will to change.

While such origins of protestation and certainly literary protest movements find traces throughout time and history, the representative facets that facilitate protestation must be understood in order to provide shades of meaning placed upon bodies of literary works. In Zoe Trodd’s “Introduction” to American Protest Literature, she explains:

Raging and reasoning, prophesying and provoking, reporting ills and proposing remedies, protest writers aim to ‘make over’ their world. The protest literature they create provides a revolutionary language and a renewed vision of the possible. It gives distinctive shape to long-accumulating grievances, claims of old rights, and demands new ones. It creates spaces for argument, introduces doubt, deepens perceptions and shatters the accepted limits of belief.[2]

The distinctions and affordances that Trodd supplies ultimately reconceputalizes the oft-contentious aspects of privilege and access as depicted in The Great Gatsby, not to mention the horrors experienced within Black Boy. Trodd further exemplifies how protestation opens additional forms of discourse with novels without stymieing the sections of grief within representative, and often canonical, pieces of American literature, then holds spaces to focus upon how they similarly seek to create a better world rather than purely basing analyses on a moral good versus bad binary. As such, hunger lies in the heart of both novels to bring forth a world of change through the Modernist literary time period. They ultimately remain “boats against a current” within a deterministic universe; yet they nevertheless create moments in which they possess the capacity to change: the capacity to protest.

Protestation supplies a rich landscape of possibilities wherein the artist demarcates an exigency where their characters may explore such possibilities and question or even work against them. According to John Stauffer in his “Foreword” in American Protest Literature, he begs a fundamental question when evaluating texts: “How are voices of dissent shaped and articulated, and how do forms of protest function as aesthetic, performative, rhetorical, and ideological expressions within culture?”[3] Stauffer’s central question explores the intersections of society and begs how one can essentially explore a set of literature in an organized manner, especially regarding marginalized and dissenting voices. Stauffer argues that “protest literature employs three rhetorical strategies in the quest to convert audiences.”[4] He notes the strategies include empathy where the text “encourages its readers to participate in the experiences of the victims, to ‘feel their pain;’”[5] shock values which “inspires outrage, agitation, and a desire to correct social ills;”[6] the final strategy employs Kenneth Burke’s idea of symbolic action that “implies indeterminacy of meaning, rich ambiguity, and open-endedness in the text, which goes beyond the author’s intent.”[7] All of protestation, Stauffer explains, can be seen through this theoretical lens of empathy, shock value, and symbolic action; however, critics of this sub-genre often question the validity of such a pragmatic way of looking at literature, noting a lack of individuality that potentially turns into homogeneity.

One aspect that scholars point to includes the level of “open-endedness” and ambiguity of a text. Paul Lauter asserts, “The question of protest literature is imbedded in the ambiguity of both those terms. ‘Protest’ is not, after all, a conventional literary term like ‘iambic pentameter,’ sonnet,’ or ‘fiction.’ It is a social dynamic, and the relationship of art—largely produced by individuals—to such social movements is always, at best, ambiguous and conflicted.”[8] Ambiguity claims to be an important yet somewhat vague framing and rhetorical device, slowly creeping toward becoming solipsistic in its critique of literature. Problematically, this same vagueness and ambiguity within the text also opens the near-need to include it as part of the dynamics of protest literature.

If ambiguity and conflict represent the best case scenario for protest literature, then we should be wary of any artist who claims to speak, unambiguously and with an easy conscience, as the voice of a movement; and we should welcome rather than shy away from the complicated questions of intention and reception that arise, say, when an artist aims for some sort of bull’s-eye and discovers that he has been shooting buckshot, which scatters.[9]

A primary issue arises when the overtness of voices within each movement conflict with each other based upon the author’s social positionality, as Saul espouses, yet the ambiguity remains vital toward the success of both the movement and literature rather than outwardly stating the claims and central thesis demonstrated within such critical works. Inasmuch, ambiguity allows for discourse and dialogue, even forcing disjuncture in the world of novel and its byproduct: textual analysis. Stauffer levels, “Protest literature taps into an ideological vein of dissent and announces to people that they are not alone in their frustrations. Protest literature is part of its milieu, inextricably linked to its time and place. But it also stands at a remove from prevailing social values, offering a critique of society from the outside.”[10] At the heart of protestation lies the ideological underpinnings that force or at least enable a social group to challenge their respective situation and seek for existing form of change—void of knowing the historical effect or legacy. “Literature, then is an artifact that carries out a sacred and perhaps even ritualistic purpose—it aids humans as an intermediary, a buffer of sorts between the hostile world in which we exist and have our being, and the ideal world of divine sanctuary that we strive for through action and imagination.”[11] As such, literature and its varied representations point to such constructions as Rebecka Rutledge Fisher alludes—both the stark, often “hostile” world embodied through the eyes of Wright to the imaginative and privileged construction of New York as visualized by Fitzgerald. Protest literature appropriates this characterized perspective and begins deconstructing the literary text’s theoretical constructions, inviting readership to recognize nuances and a symbolic action that the authors respectively seek to make—whether deliberately pronounced or not.

Exploring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, the lens of protest literature invites further discourse apropos of movements through a contemporaneous framework. Both texts situate themselves during the Roaring Twenties: a time of prosperity, success, and a growing promise for the future. Yet, this promise is neither afforded to the same people nor the same geographic locations. The issues espoused within Fitzgerald’s novel juxtaposes Wright’s autobiography; however, they both inherently touch upon the larger concepts of how marginalized voices shape, narrate, and call for change amidst the narrative of those in the majority who attempt to keep their privilege in any historical moment. Protest literature altogether better informs the social conditions and plights in history, yet those same texts simultaneously provide a platform for marginalized or unheard voices to rise up—attempting to procure change through the strategies of empathy, shock value, and symbolic action.

II. HUNGER’S INDETERMINANCY OF MEANING

Hunger stole upon me so slowly that at first I was not aware of what hunger really meant. Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly. The hunger I had known before this had been no grim, hostile stranger; it had been a normal hunger that made me beg constantly for bread, and when I ate a crust or two I was satisfied.[12]

Hunger represents a kaleidoscopic endeavor that affects humankind in different manners: from Wright’s case as a literature hunger as a means of cessation and satisfaction to Gatsby’s hunger for a physical manifestation of change and installation of a new life. At least on a conceptual level, hunger demarcates the driving force for a change in one’s positionality either in society or within their own social sphere of influence or perhaps lack thereof. Hunger, then, becomes emblematic of what Edmund Burke—appropriated by Stauffer—dictates as symbolic action as part of his “Foreword.”

In one instance in Black Boy, Wright provides an anecdote wherein he attempts to find someone to purchase his dog in order to feed both he and his family; however, after selling the dog to a young white girl, he failed to take the money as the funds were three cents short. Wright accounts, “A week later Betsy [the dog] was crushed to death beneath the wheels of a coal wagon. I cried and buried her in the backyard and drove and barrel staving into the ground at the head of her grave. My mother’s sole comment was: ‘You could have had a dollar. But you can’t eat a dead dog, can you?’”[13] This moment signifies two important aspects that he presents to his readers: the autobiography of hardship as well as the idea of a hunger deferred. The hunger, in the earliest moments in Black Boy become immediate and nearly insatiable: they represent a hunger for survival and necessity. “The entire book is strung between hunger and satisfaction, as well as light and dark and black and white, and similarly opposing, irreconcilable forces.”[14] Through Thaddeus’ statement, it becomes clear that this hunger that Wright employs takes on a rhetorically ambiguous and deeply personal notion of hunger synonymous with that of belonging as well as challenging the forces that be. Thus, Wright’s life and writing become malleable through the drastic changes in his life—both the felt affordances as well as the necessary challenges to bring him to the penultimate terminus: maturity. During his youth, the young Wright must contend with hardships in order to lead to a cessation of immediate hunger, only replaced with a hunger for change.

As Richard Wright’s Bildungsroman continues, he begins finding his hunger elsewhere: an intellectual and existential hunger that he attempts to sate through the literary scholars who preceded him. This construction of “self” to Wright came in the form of not only understanding his sociological positionality but also his potential held within his geographical and temporal reality:

Could I ever learn about life and people? To me, with my vast ignorance, my Jim Crow station in life, it seemed a task impossible of achievement. I had learned to live with hate. But to feel that there were feelings denied me, that the very breath of life itself was beyond my reach, that more than anything else hurt, wounded me. I had a new hunger.[15]

This discussion in particular speaks to the larger thematic strains that follow in Black Boy—a Black Existentialism that ultimately shapes him not only as an artist and writer but also as an individual writ large. Magnus O. Bassey explains, “…whereas European existentialists advocate freedom of choice for the individual, Africana theorists are concerned with the way human frailties (slavery, colonialism, and oppression) have hindered Black people from achieving their freedom.”[16] Bassey’s statement illuminates much of what occurs in Part II entitled “The Horror and the Glory,” namely as Wright continues to explore as well as expound upon his critical thinking of his position not only within the Black community but also contending with the white-based power structures that continually stymie his growth to his true potential. Perhaps nothing quite clearly articulates Bassey’s assertion more than Wright’s final words in his novel: “I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.”[17] Therefore, Wright’s hunger shifts through the autobiographical accounts he provided from physical desire and hunger for the conceptualization of being not only seen but also represented. What becomes illuminated by this scene in Black Boy rests in the hunger for existence and meaning: aspects that existentialism seeks to amend. Inasmuch, Black existential philosophy “raised questions of African and African American existence, being, consciousness, hopelessness, helplessness, oppression, human predicament, and empowerment.”[18]

This rendering and philosophical understanding of the often confused or misinterpreted philosophical framing of existentialism supplies a more nuanced approach to the journey of which Wright took within Black Boy. However, Wright’s reading parallels with another existentially centered and inspired reading of Ralph Ellison’s “Prologue” to Invisible Man wherein the unnamed narrator-protagonist announces: “I am an invisible man…I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”[19] Both Wright and Ellison afford themselves moments of agency amid, even in opposition to, the outside influences that aim to deconstruct their holistic identities. What sets the authors apart, however, remains their fight for significance and meaning in a seemingly deterministic universe. Bassey therefore argues, “African critical theory or Black existential philosophy therefore is concerned with the critique of Black subjugation and dehumanization.”[20] Both topics that Bassey remarks upon become clearly and expressively illuminated through Wright’s journey of boyhood to adulthood within a deterministic universe. In this locus, he must contend with the hunger that drove him to degradation, to the hunger that now plagues individuals presently: the hunger for representation, for social justice, and for personal agency.

Accordingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion of “hunger” represents a two-fold approach, much like The Great Gatsby holistically concerns itself with: hunger of power and prestige; hunger of a concept of love unattainable and abdicating the bounds of a loveless marriage in pursuit of independence. This hunger, while certainly demonstrated by various characters, more closely aligns with the characters of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan. “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you.’ After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house—just as if it were five years ago.”[21] Gatsby desires the thought or notion of Daisy Buchanan and what she represents for his personal attainment: his hunger lies in the mere idea of her and the “gaining of her,” void of her personal agency. Thus, the conceptualization of Daisy as an abstraction makes more sense as it relates to Gatsby’s personal hunger. He attempts to devour her from her husband Tom, and he hungers for the cultural prestige and capital that comes from the socio-economic affordances provided within this fictitious union. Inasmuch, Fitzgerald remarks that Daisy’s voice “’is full of money…’ that was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it…High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl.”[22] The description of Daisy’s voice only exasperates this class-based recognition of where she rests in comparison to that of a character like Gatsby, with Fitgerald’s metaphors and allusions enveloping a monarchical rendering—a period of old. It becomes almost as though Gatsby, documented through Fitzgerald, deconstructs Daisy’s inner-being—failing to care of any humanistic or redemptive qualities—and reduces her to mere concepts and pursuits of the elusive American Dream.

The notion of this American Dream, abstract as it may be, represents the hunger for which Jay Gatsby tirelessly seeks to attain throughout his life in order to gain and acquire goods as a means of conspicuous consumption and flaunt his acquired wealth. His hunger, therefore, equates to the capitalist greed that envelops the “self-made man” social construction. Benjamin Schreier alludes to the fact that both The Great Gatsby and Gatsby himself attempt to create and solidify this notion of an American identity. “[A]n object alternatively of desire and skepticism. Interpreted through Nick’s insecure skepticism rather than through Gatsby’s deluded optimism—and therefore through doubt about identity’s ability to signify rather than through faith in its representational promise—the novel ultimately lacks faith in the symbolic order on which stable conceptions of identity rely.”[23] Schreier’s statement correlates to the false narrative that Fitzgerald seeks to make using his protagonist on his quest of gaining both economic means and commodification in order to “make it” in America represented in its standards of the American Dream. The embodiment of the American Dream becomes demonstrated through Gatsby’s history and past: “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God…So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year old boy would likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”[24] As Nick Carraway narrates the novel, he fails to take issue or possible ire with the performative aspect of Gatsby’s entire identity; rather, he finds it affirming of what it takes to succeed in America within its respective historical moment. Thus, in relation to the distillation of the New York elite and wealth, the continued constructions and fictions produced by Gatsby only reifies the true nature that this notion of the American Dream and identity remains a fiction—created, manifested, and protected by those who can afford it.

America is an inextricable from the absurdity of its realization: this book cannot separate the epistemological majesty of the imperial enterprise from its articulation in Gatsby’s ‘roadhouse.’ But that doesn’t simply mean that American history is a tale of corruption. In this book, the pure ideality of ‘America’ is not betrayed by experience; on the contrary, experience is betrayed by the ideal fiction called ‘America.’[25]

The social construction and the “self-made” person run rampant in The Great Gatsby in which the protagonist seeks nothing more—and blinded to—the fueling of a desire of hunger for commodities in hopes of gaining the attention and hand of one whom he lost years before. Juxtaposed and buttressed against Black Boy, the conceptions of hunger prove both the morphing and malleability of what hunger dictates both for agency and for survival.

Altogether, the concept of hunger and its indeterminate meanings ultimately provide nuance for readers to pass judgement and critique. One cannot altogether come away with the same reading—some with the lens of New Criticism—but also for one’s locus of privilege, access, or otherwise. Yet, hunger speaks to the effects of symbolic action as proffered by Stauffer in that it holds indeterminacy: one that attempts to negotiate and make sense of the grey areas of the novel. However, Wright’s form of hunger manifests in both physical and epistemological hunger; Gatsby’s hunger evinces a capitalistic and hegemonic form in scope. This hunger nearly mirrors the growth and prosperity that formed during the cultural Roaring Twenties moment which the novels contend in ways relevant to their author’s life and positionality within the same United States. Both novels, by virtue, embrace this indeterminacy and force the readership to participate—and at times become complicit—to the actions unfolding to better understand the manners that protestation and protest literature may ultimately embody.

III. CONFRONTING RACE AND PROTESTATION

Black Boy and The Great Gatsby explore race in systematically different manners, with one in respect to positionality and the other serving to create distinction between homogeneity versus the constructed “Other.” The Great Gatsby remains a deeply “White” novel, with the events delivering a thesis of privilege and wealth; juxtaposing Fitzgerald’s novel, Black Boy perhaps delineates the power struggles between his lived experience and those around him. Hunger, therefore, becomes infused with race, wealth, and the affordances that come with them. Black Boy and The Great Gatsby treat the topic of race in telling manners. Black Boy broaches the topic of race as an existential facet that becomes constructed as a life lived and a topic with which one must contend on a continual basis. On the other hand, The Great Gatsby integrates coded terminology that evokes racist remarks, sought to be understood as off-handed comments in the name of characterization. Wright’s conception of race is perhaps best emphasized with his protagonist’s writing published in a newspaper: “I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”[26] This sentiment signifies a self-consciousness of Wright’s positionality within the structures of America during the early 1920s: a position wherein embarking upon a journey of self-improvement becomes marred by racism and hegemony—two factors uncontrollable but rather imprinted upon levels of Blackness found in the novel itself. Though Wright copes with not only levels of white hegemony around him, but he must also negotiate the tenuous balance of straddling two worlds: white and black.

Positionally, Richard Wright’s youth serves to demarcate such lines which become illustrated by a speech—again reminiscent of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—he was to deliver; however, the principal sought to give him a version that would be suited more for a larger audience. Yoshinobu Hakutani claims, “Black Boy is intended as a sociological document rather than a novel; what such a document shows is the fact that the oppressors are as much victims of the elemental design of racism as are the oppressed. The center of Wright’s interest, then, rests on deciphering this design.”[27] The framing device that Hakutani explores can be seen through the tethering lines represented in the graduation speech. “’Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night. What can you alone think of saying to them? You have no experience…”[28] Wright finds himself between the life in which he lived buttressed against the world of the unknown: the world of the white elite. Such moments speak to the issues presented to the symbolic action that Wright seeks to make, even working within the discursive relations of racial politics. Black Boy constructs race along the insular world in which his characters must live within; however, he also interrogates how others view the population in the process. “My inability to adjust myself to the white world had already shattered a part of the structure of my personality and had broken down the inner barriers to crime; the only thing that now stood in the way was the lack of immediate opportunity, a final push of circumstance.”[29] He contends with the attempt at a life he could eventually gain through experience, performance, and toil: an opportunity not necessarily provided to him.

However, The Great Gatsby instead explores the cautionary tale of those with perhaps too much opportunity and the ways in which that very same privilege solidifies class-based power and hegemonic systems. Fitzgerald emboldens racial differences through a socio-geographic and economic configuration of the events that transpire in The Great Gatsby. The bulk of his novel takes place in two primary locations: East Egg and Long Island proper. However, nestled between the two Eggs lies what Fitzgerald calls the “valley of ashes”—a locus of labor and those struggling to contend with the pressures and fears of a changing economic environment in the wake of the Great War. “This is the valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and risking smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.”[30] On balance, labor does not become factored in Fitzgerald’s novel, thus the valley of ashes geographically illuminates the lines of access and those in positions foisted upon them due to a growing disparity of privilege. The valley of ashes remains a telling juxtaposition to the glamorous and elite classes seen in both East Egg and Manhattan—a vivid reminder “’that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages you’ve had.’”[31] This distance that becomes nestled between the two primary locations signals the lack of upward mobility for those living within the valley—George and Myrtle Wilson being emblematic of such a population—yet, the central characters may pass freely between and through this division, with their access, privilege, and power still intact. Adam Meehan explains, “Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes can be said to serve the same function in relation to American civilization as manifested in the views of Tom and other nativists of the time…The valley of ashes thus becomes a symbolic reservoir for society’s abject…”[32] Meehan’s comment suggests and exasperates such differences in his analysis of this liminal space.

The Great Gatsby does not carry much weight as it relates to race; however, much of the discourse surrounding the topic relates and aligns closely with the usage of coded language and interpretive measures. Constructions of race and racial relationships become signified by Tom Buchanan—with “two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward”[33] — wherein he exasperatingly complains: “’Well, it’s a fine book [The Rise of the Colored Empires by Goddard] and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.’”[34] Tom’s racially coded language ultimately gives rise to his holistic characterization. An integral argument breaks out among the major characters wherein Tom states, “’I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, it’s the idea you can count me out…Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”[35] Following Tom’s disdain, a troubling remark comes from Jordan Baker: a seemingly neutral figure yet privileged in her own right. “Flushed with his impassioned gibberish, he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization. ’We’re all white here,’ murmured Jordan.”[36]

The scene and comment from Jordan Baker demonstrate the ever-present institutional forms of racism that permeate conversations with levels of privilege, thus nearly embodying an echo chamber as it relates to the topics of race, class, and wealth within those living in East Egg as compared to West Egg to say virtually nothing about those who inhabit the valley of ashes. This comment signifies a dramatic shift in the tone provided from Jordan up to this point in the novel: rather than a continuation of neutral, if not off-handedly dismissive, role in the discourse regarding race, she signals the level to which this novel speaks to levels of “Whiteness” that still makes it problematic reading within even the present historical moment.

Remarking upon Tom’s fears espoused in his tirade, Barbara Will explains, “What the dash in Tom’s statement represents is what, for him, would be unspeakable—miscegenation, a process through which ’whiteness’ and ’color’ become undifferentiated, through which ’race’ itself, and the white race in particular, become indeterminate.”[37] Tom’s relationship with race denotes a drastic fear and misrepresentation of other racialized perspectives that stand, at least in Tom’s mind, in opposition to his standards and way of life. Tom’s comment brings forth a further continuance of a nationalist ideology—spurned only further by Stoddard’s work, of which he became enamored—but also calls to mind an Orientalist, post-colonial perspective and binary of us versus them. Tom—and by remaining complicit, the other characters in The Great Gatsby—seeks to uphold a balance of both authority and hegemony. The levels of power, privilege, and difference situates themselves well before the plot that transpired in The Great Gatsby and still illuminates modern discourse regarding race and the constructed “other.”

With its strong central theme and concern of race, Richard Wright’s Black Boy expounds upon a narrative of change and the symbolic action that would soon propel the protagonist from his current position. One such way he achieved this endeavor was through intellectual growth: production and practice. Wright understands the entrenched ideals that America represented, ones that did not include him within the grand and often hegemonic narrative. As such, he seeks knowledge and the maintenance of it as a means of protesting a lack of agency afforded. “Though they were merely stories, I accepted them as true because I wanted to believe them, because I hungered for a different life, for something new. The cheap pulp tales enlarged my knowledge of the world more than anything I had encountered so far.”[38] Wright enumerates upon this symbolic action: a change he seeks to make, a world that envelops and celebrates his identity and newfound source and knowledge if not full existential protestation. Hakutani states, “Because he knew he could not make the world, he sought to make things happen within him and caught a sense of freedom; in so doing he discovered the new world.”[39] The quest for knowledge, despite the racial-sentiments and exigency calls for the artist to develop a voice which is exactly as Wright developed, manifested, and perfected. Herbert Leibowitz writes, “The central motif of Black Boy and American Hunger is hunger. The word and sensations stalk him like an assassin, but besides hungering for food, affection justice, and knowledge…Wright yearned for words.”[40] By producing speeches and continuation of knowledge, Wright possessed the capacity to not only develop but also propel his own voice. While hunger may be a representative facet that pushed him to continue his journey, hunger also illuminates the racial differences that permeate the drastically dissimilar plot lines of both Black Boy and The Great Gatsby.

As a means of protest literature, Richard Wright and F. Scott Fitzgerald explore various rhetorical strategies in manners which rely upon the reader to disseminate the meaning of either the gaining of agency from Wright to the outright racial politics and anxieties expressed in Fitzgerald’s novel. The interpretation and extrapolation lead to not only symbolic action of conducive change, but it also asks the reader to evaluate class-based privileges and labor divisions during the “Roaring Twenties.” Though race serves as an integral aspect of Wright’s Bildungsroman, Fitgerald’s use of racially codified linguistic turns provide a tapestry of power, difference, and a lack of reconciliation even at the finality of his novel. A negotiation of the awareness of marginalization and varied perspectives must be taken into effect as well as the ways in which authors sought agency in a seemingly tone-deaf world and holistic literary canon.

IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS

Both Richard Wright’s Black Boy and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explore America as it was and, to some degree, remains at present. The notion of Gatsby’s “green light,” though not necessarily a direct facsimile for Wright’s hunger, delineate the manners by which protestation and protest literature writ large may serve to educate its audience of the issues that connects both the enclosed text but also the larger social exigency. Perhaps Wright explains it best when regarding his fellow Communist party comrades at the finality of his autobiographical account. “There was no concrete changes that they could bring against me. They were simply afraid of that which was not familiar. They were more fearful of my ideas than they would have been had I held a gun on them; they could have taken the gun away from me and shot me with it, but they did not know what to do with ideas.”[41] Such a protestation comes in terms of modifying his own positionality from a purely sociological and racialized framework: endeavoring to change social circumstances wherein the larger institutional and socio-political umbrella continually worked against his pleas, thus turning his life into a form of protest itself. Hakutani levels, “Like sociology, it not only analyzes a social problem but offers a solution to the problem it treats. Wright’s purpose is to study the way in which black life in the South was determined by its environments.”[42] Therefore, Wright’s novel explores more than merely his immediate issues but extends well beyond the bounds of his exigency. The article also points to the vast intersections which can be found in Black Boy and that there remains an indeterminacy within those meanings. For this purpose, symbolic action seems to be the stand-in for the sociological underpinnings to which Hakutani alludes.

When conceptualizing Stauffer‘s three rhetorical strategies, both Black Boy and The Great Gatsby effectively portray a protestation to the worlds in which they were created. Empathy, shock value, and symbolic action may serve as a theoretical framework and analytic schema for which the reader may evaluate the writing; however, they also speak of ways to better understand socio-historical and cultural concerns. Disparate discourses must be waged in and upon the literary canon apropos of agency for marginalized voices that Wright represents; the challenging of Fitzgerald also delineates the nuances of what protest literature may ultimately provide. The reader may interpret the indeterminacy through different lenses, be that historical, racial, or affect-based in their respective approach. “Raging and reasoning, prophesying and provoking, reporting ills and proposing remedies, protest writers aim to ’make over’ their world. The protest literature they create provides a revolutionary language and a renewed vision of the possible.”[43] Both Black Boy and The Great Gatsby remain hallmarks for the manners which they seek to protest in their respective manners: full of contradictions, yet steadfast in their ability to create or find a better world through their vehement desires for change in a way they find conducive to their socio-historical and cultural positionality.

End Notes

[1] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, W.W. Norton & Company, ed. by David J. Alworth (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 117.

[2] Zoe Trodd, “Introduction,” in American Protest Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), xi.

[3] John Stauffer, “Foreword,” in American Protest Literature, xii.

[4] Stauffer, “Foreword,” xiii.

[5] Stauffer, xiii.

[6] Stauffer, xiii.

[7] Stauffer, xiii.

[8] Paul Lauter,” Teaching Protest Literature,” The Radical Teacher 70 (Fall 2007): 12.

[9] Scott Saul, “Protest Lit 101,” American Literary History 21, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 405.

[10] Stauffer, xii.

[11] Rebecka Rutledge Fisher, ”Symbolic Wrights: The Poetics of Being Underground.” Obsidian 11, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2010): 23.

[12] Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2020), 14.

[13] Wright, Black Boy, 71.

[14] Janice Thaddeus, “The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy?” American Literature 52, no. 2 (May 1985): 202.

[15] Wright, 250.

[16] Magnus O. Bassey, “What is Africana Critical Theory or Black Existentialist Philosophy?” Journal of Black Studies 37, no. 6 (July 2007): 920.

[17] Wright, 384.

[18] Bassey, 914.

[19] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 3.

[20] Bassey, 916.

[21] Fitzgerald, 72.

[22] Fitzgerald, 78.

[23] Benjamin Schreier, ”Desire’s Second Act: ’Race’ and The Great Gatsby’s Cynical Americanism,” Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 155.

[24] Fitzgerald, 65.

[25] Schreier, 175-176.

[26] Wright, 169.

[27] Yoshinobu Hakutani, ”Creation of the Self in Richard Wright’s Black Boy,” Black American Literature Forum 19, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 32.

[28] Wright, 174.

[29] Wright, 201.

[30] Fitzgerald, 18.

[31] Fitzgerald, 5.

[32] Adam Meehan, ”Repetition, Race, and Desire in The Great Gatsby,” Journal of Modern Literature 37, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 86.

[33] Fitzgerald, 9.

[34] Fitzgerald, 13.

[35] Fitzgerald, 84.

[36] Fitzgerald, 84.

[37] Barbara Will, ”The Great Gatsby and the Obscene Word,” College Literature 32, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 132.

[38] Wright, 129.

[39] Hakutani, 75.

[40] Herbert Leibowitz, “Richard Wright’s Black Boy: Styles of Deprivation,” Southwest Review 70, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 72.

[41] Wright, 339.

[42] Hakutani, 71.

[43] Trodd, xix.