Essay --

Richard Wright and William Faulkner both examine the psychologies of excluded members of society. While in primaeval Son, Wright studies someone oppressed and d witnesstrodden beneath society, Faulkner looks at a family of outsiders cast far away from a common community in As I Lay Dying. For both, a central question becomes the function of their characters minds in relation to one another, and to reality. Through different approaches, both Wright and Faulkner conduct modernist explorations of the social friendlesss interiority. To accomplish this, each authors narrative fathom traverses the gradient from realism to experimental fragmentation, Wright constructing a vertical consciousness, articulate and all-knowing regarding Biggers psychological world, and Faulkner accessing a plane one, mostly illustrating the Bundrens surface thoughts and emotions.In Native Son, Wrights principally naturalistic style, momentarily interrupted by rebellious points of fragmented, modernist lan guage, reflects in form Biggers overwhelming repression through with(predicate)out the novel and his liberating moments of agency. The naturalism contributes to a narrative vowelise that can articulate Biggers fears, impulses, and desires with much greater ordinariness than Bigger himself is capable of. This allows Wright to explore Biggers consciousness in a vertical manner, omnisciently understanding emotional mechanisms not apparent to Bigger. It is as though we are looking narrowly down at Bigger, and through him. While the narrative voice sees that Biggers violent temper swings are the result of his frustrated potential in a single out society, Bigger only knows these moods as the rhythms of his life... ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible force (... ...ngs their interior lives into such vivid relief that it suggests brusk or meaningless external existences. For the Bundrens, such vivid interiors, without constrictions, seem to nurture from lack of compression, while for Bigger, extreme downward pressure on his person makes him a volatile character. By exploring this outcasts interiority through a vertical consciousness, Wright has proven the dangerous lack of agency a immature black man has, in segregated Chicago, even over his own actions. Faulkner, by exploring the Bundrens interior life through a horizontal consciousness, has proven their lack of agency in a different way. They start control over their actions, but their actions, overshadowed, seem to put on no affects. By either being oppressed or ignored, both groups of people have damaged consciousnesses, in which they nevertheless discover some relief.