ABSTRACT
I n one of the essays in his 1957 book, White Man, Listen!, Richard Wright claims, “The Negro is America’s metaphor.” By this he meant not only that blacks were the symbolic embodiment of the history of America, an outcast people trying to find a new identity in the New World, but also that they were, through the circumstances of being forced to live in a country “whose laws, customs, and instruments of force were leveled against them,” constant reminders of the anguish of being without an identity, constant reminders of human alienation. According to Ralph Ellison, Wright’s good friend back in the 1930s, “The white American has charged the Negro American with being without a past or tradition (something which strikes the white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once typical of European cultures.”
