Redeemed time : the sacramental vision and implicit covenant in the major fiction of Richard Wright

In the twentieth-century theologies of Tillich and Earth and their corresponding notions of "revelation," one sees that Wright's method reflects Tillich's view that reason leads to revelation and the kairos experience, whereas Flannery O'Connor, or any other traditional white southern writer (Faulkner, Warren, Tate), expresses the Barthian view that man's reason leads always to deception and sinfulness (man is non posse non peccare). The first applications in Wright's work come in Uncle Tom's Children, particularly in Big Boy in "Big Boy Leaves Home" and Aun' Sue in "Bright and Morning Star." Clearly, these characters embody the homo religiosus who perceives "revelation" through "seeing" truth and acting upon its demands.

Unlike the positive examples of Uncle Tom's Children, Jake Jackson of Lawd Today and Cross Damon of The Outsider display an inability to achieve a balance between the head and the heart which leads to a meaningful existence in Wright's fiction. Jake's overemphasis of the emotional seduces him to a blind acceptance of the myths of bourgeois capitalism, whereas Cross' propensity toward ratiocination drives him to an isolato status, similar to those characters in Hawthorne and O'Connor, cut off from the human community. Even in these negative examples, however, Wright projects the ideal implicitly for the reader's acceptance.

Bigger Thomas embodies an admixture of the two previously discussed characters. He gets cut off from the folk culture of Black Chicago and accidentally smothers Mary Dalton when he is trapped in her room, but he finally "deconstructs" American society through the use of a religious progression from passive victim to active Christ figure. First, the Yahwehistic motif predominates through the violence involving Mary and Bessie. Then the Christ or messianic motif supplants the earlier violence with a reconstructed community achieved between Bigger and the sensitive reader.

Wright's most fully developed examples of the homo religiosus are freddaniels in "The Man Who Lived Underground," the autobiographical persona in Black Boy, and Fishbelly in The Long Dream. They complete the cycle of Richard Wright's ubiquitous concern for religious problems in his major characters. Wright's eternal prophecy remains, imbedded in the works themselves, urging all men to live more meaningful lives and fulfill their destinies in a society "deconstructed" from the dehumanizing myths of their past failures.