Memoire Online - Existentialism in Richard Wright's Native Son and The Outsider

1 express my gratitude to aIl those who guided me through this modest exploration of Richard Wright and his existentialism.

1 owe particular thanks to my supervisor Dr René AHOUANSOU whose advice and support made the completion of this essay possible.

1 would like to acknowledge the timely and valuable assistance ofProfessor Luc FANOU.

My greatest debt however is to 'aIl my prof essors of the English Department for the quality of their teaching which sharpened my skiIls.

1 cannot forget to express special regards to my parents and relatives for their love and support.

INTRODUCTION"''''''''''''''' "'''''''''' """""''''''''''''' PART ONE THE BASIC ELEMENTS OF EXISTENTIALISM	'"'''''''''''''''''''' -i,	. .~
CHAPTER 1 HISTO RI CAL EVOLUTION		7
1 1- THE PRECURSORS		7
1 2- THE MODERN EXISTENTIALISTS		10
CH APTE R II E XI STE NTIAL PRIN C IPL ES	..:	16
II 1- ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE		16	II 2- THE BASIC TENETS
	19
PART TWO RICHARD WRIGHT'S iLLUSTRATION OF EXISTENTIALISM .-c		-- --~
CHAPTE R III NATIVE SON		29
III 1- BIGGER THOMAS'S HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT		30
III 2- BIGGER THOMAS'S EMANCIPATION ."'"''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' 38
III 3..BIGGER THOMAS'S REJECTION OF RELIGION		46
CHAPTER IV THE 0 UTS ID ER '''''''		53
IV 1- CROSS DAMON'S DREADFUL LIFE		54
IV 2- CROSS DAMON'S NEW EXISTENCE .."'"''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' 56
IV 3- CROSS DAMON'S DENIAL OF IDEOLOGY		63
PART THRE.E ASSESSMENT OF RICHARD WRIGHT'S EXISTENTlALISM;s:'
CHAPTER V A CRITICAL STUDY OF WRIGHT'S HEROES		68

INTRODUCTION

Richard Wright's literary achievement is exceptionally great. The black writer prepared and nourished the ground for the fiction of social protest. More than any writer of his period, he helps in inserting a great consciousness in Blacks

significance, he becfmes for many Negroes a symbol fot the spontaneous creative impulses of the race. Ris novels are outstanding examples in the fiction of social protest : they establish the black artist's reputation in America and other countries. Ris works belong to the Afro -American hJ!l1 1anistic tradition which includes a search for freedom, truth, beauty, peace, human dignity, and social justice.

When we considèr the writer's special contribution to American literature, we remember the stories in his main books: Native Son, Black Boy, The Outsider. They have a high quality of revelation and reflect the writer's persistent attempt to explore the actual inner life of Negroes. At the same time, Wright exposès the

social, educational, and economi'è):t:estrictions as an attempt to show the objective reality of the American society. Wright's works constitute his own assault upon society. The stories in his books are a brutal, startling, and undisguised comment not on life, but on a way of having to live and being forced to live in ignorance,

fear and shame. The writer is thus preoccupied with the heroes who violently hurl themselves against the walls that bar them from a life, they know is a better life. The structure oftheir personality, the pattern oftheir emotions and. the type oftheir dreams are the measures of the author's honesty and his self-knowledge as a man. Re performs his dut y as a committed black intellectual whose main mission is to

Richard Wright is an example of black boy born to poor parents. Re has a great potential for genius - but lives under the circumstances of a racially divided and poverty-stricken Southland. Ris personality suffers great trauma in his earliest and most formative years. The negative elements of 1 neurotic family and broken

home in which there is religious fanaticism and cruelty are mixed together to make out his fiction. The misery of his youth and his early political commitment provides him with a need for efficiency, and motivatef him to raise problems, sugges~ew possibilities and solutions. His life is dominated by a set of ideas and philosophies that he personally embraces and then weaves into his writing. Of great importance is the inclusion of existentialism in his body of ideas. He seriously read Kierkegaard and studied Nietzsche. Wright further adventures into the works of existentialist philosophers like Martin Heidegger and JeaJ-Paul Sartre. Wright is obsessed with the psychology of oppressed people and the

creative depths of the unconscious mind. He always reads philosoph~ from. the materialist point of view and he accepts Marxist theories of history, economics, politics, and social class analysis. Nonetheless, Wright is in the realistic tradition of Fyodor Dostoïevsky; he constantly tries to represent reality so intensely that characters, situations, actions appear to transcend reality. His intellectual journey moves from southern black expression of Christianity to dialectical materialism

We need to understand this intellectual journey and how it relates to aIl Wright's works as a novelist of ideas. Wright's existentialism does not, as many believe, begin in Paris. It develops as a result of his experiences : he turns against'X

orthodox religion at an early age because of the religious fanaticism in his family/ \, He grows up in a South where lynching, Jim Crow, and every egregious form of racism are rampant, where the fate of a black boy is not only tenuous or nebulous,

but often one of doom. Living poor and black in a hostile white world gives him his first knowledge of the human condition. He is deeply marked by the existentialist vision of life he encountered in his childhood and adolescence, which is compounded by painful poverty, the cruel religious fanaticism of his maternaI family, and the frustration of a broken family. That is why, the existentialist issue

Richard Wright is known to be one of the first Afro-American writers to have dealt with existentialism in his fiction.

ln this respect, his novels Native Son and The Outsider attain a tremendous accuracy in the aim of showing his existentialism. The author depicts his protagonists Bigger Thomas and Cross Damon as the historical rebel and the metaphysical rebel. Wright's philosophy is that fundamentaIly, aIl men are potentially evil. Every man is capable of murder or violence and has a natural propensity for evil. Evil in nature and man are the same; nature is ambivalent, and man may be naturally perverse and quixotic as nature. Human nature and human society are determinants and, being what he is, man is merely a pawn caught between the worlds of necessity and freedom. He is alone against the odds of Nature, Chance, Fate, and the vicissitudes of life. AlI that he has to use in his defence and the direction of his existence are his reason and his will. By the

As aIl great writers ,Wright's life and work has been examined by each generation of students. But we become aware of the fact that an important theme like Existentialism in Richard Wright's Works has never been fully debated at the English Department. ln our investigations we unfortunately notice that few are the students who have found Wright's existentialism as a large topic and devoted an entire development to it. They have been interested in other themes such as racism, crime, violence, environment and personality in Wright's works. That is why, for the purpose of our memoir, we have chosen to work on su ch a topic.

The purpose of our work is two-fold : to define Richard Wright's existentialism, and to show the correlation between the man and his work. As this

study is based on Native Son and The Outsider,_we will try to point out some of the

existentialist characteristics displayed by the heroes in these two novels and evaluate the effectiveness of their struggle. ln view of what has been said above, it is clear that the study will use the methodology of descriptive research since it goes through different data related to Wright's fiction, and aims at showing his

existentialist views. The study will help us to examine Wright's existentialism in order to stress the way it is ambivalent.

Our work is divided into three parts. The first part will be an account of the basic elements of existentialism, and it highlights the historical evolution and the existential principles. The second part includes an analysis of Richard Wright's existentialist novels, and it focuses on Native Son and The Outsider. The third part deals with the assessment of Wright's existentialism.

Existentialism is a term applied to a group of attitudes current in philosophical, religious, artistic thought during and after W orld War 2, which emphasises existence rather than essence. ln its modem expression, existentialism had its beginnings in the writings of the nineteenth-century Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger is important in its formulation, and the French essayist Jean-Paul Sartre has done most to give it its present form and popularity.

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was born at Copenhagen on 5th May 1813, into a family of 7 children. Young Soren has been raised in an atmosphere of austere

rigid Protestantism during aH his childhood. Without being familiarised with religion, without any former preparation, the young boy is directly introduced to the harsh and authentic Christianism exemplified by the image of Christ dying on the cross for our sins.

his studies at the Faculty of Theblogy in Copenhagen university. ln October 1843, the Danish theologian published Fear and Tremblement in which he spoke of Abraham and

question of sin appeared under the title The Concept of Dread. Until his death in 1855, he put down many other notes and philosophical reflections in his diary Papirer.

ln term of ontology or the branch of philosophy dealing with Being, the precursor of existentialism defined man as a "synthesis of soul and body led by the spirit" 1

"Man is spirit. But what is the spirit? The spirit is the self. What is the self? The self is the relation to oneself or the possibility of that relationship to refer to

ln that vision, man is a being-in-relation and not a static substrate. Ruman existence is therefore a synthesis of aH these factors making man's nature.

Existence is a perpetuaI relationship developed by the combinations spirit-soulbody, temporal-etemal, liberty-necessity. To say if more c1 early, man is nothing but his actions.

The immediate consequence of Kierkegaardian ontology is the personal commitment of the existing individu al in the hum an situation. Its significant is fact that we and things "În general exist, but these things have no meaning for us except when we create meaning through acting upon them. The existentialist's

point of departure is the immediate sense of awareness that human beings have of their situation; a part of this awareness is the sense they have of the absurdity

contradiction produces in them a discomfort, an anxiety in the face of human limitations and a desire to invest experience with meaning by acting upon the world, although efforts to act in a meaningless, "absurd" world lead to anguish,

Criticising Hegelian rationalism, the Danish theologian sees the inadequacy of human reason to explain the enigma of the universe as the basic philosophical question. He finds ultimate solution in faith : only a transcendental Being can help us bear the absurdity of the world. He has hope and faith because he believes in this ultimate Being as God, Love, Oneness of immortal Mind, and infinite Spirit. By a leap of faith he finds ultimate communion and existence in God, and this sustains him. Kierkegaard' s ideas can be summed up through Tertullien's words: Credo quia abs 'urduml.

But during the last half of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedriech Nietzsche substituting the traditional theocentrism for a courageous anthropocentrism has prodaimed the death of God. He used the term "nihilism" to designate the morbid crisis falling upon the modem world: the collapse of

values or decadence. As the existence tums out to be worthless because of the nothingness of old values, it is up to man to innovate and change those values. Man's ability to "transvaluate" lays in his awareness of the nothingness of old values. As a matter of fact, Nietzsche daims that man is set free from God' s domination -gods do not exist, or even if they exist, they do not care for man's situation. God is an illusion of the mind. Therefore, there is no reason to fear a dead God and restrain one's actions and freedom. The Nietzschean prototype of is the Superman.

"Superior men, that God is your greatest danger. You have been resurrected since he is left dead in his grave.

It is now time for the great hour. It is now time for the superior man to become the master (u.). God is dead :it

called Will to power (Wille zur macht) .That Will to power is to be educated and sustained by severe exigencies. Indeed, human existence is a

idealism as mere imagination, a world of fiction which corresponds to our desire. The Will to power cannot stand any idealism.

The point of existentialism in Nietzchean philosophy is his calI for man to create values and invent his way layout good and bad.

1-2 THE MODERN EXISTENTIALISTS

ln theearly twentieth century, aIl those pre-existential reflections will be formulated into a system by another German philosopher Martin Heidegger. The latter was born on 26th September 1889 at Messkirch, a small rural city in Badeland. By 1909 he passed his Abitur (GCE examination) and registered for The Faculty of Theology at Fribourg University. Four semesters later, he decides to leave theological studies for philosophy in which he gets a PhD degree. After the first W orld War burst out in 1914, Martin Heidegger was

appointed as Privatdozent (Assistant professor) at Fribourg University; during autumn 1916, he has worked under the authority of the famous phenomenologist Edmund Husserl who will be his mentor and godfather his life long.

By February 1927, the disciple of Husserl has published his main work Being and Time (Sein und zeit) in which he paves a new way for the transcendental study of subjectivity. ln that treatise, he uses Husserl's phenomenology to speculate in ontology and answer the fundamental questions

:" what is the being in general? What is it possible to know about the being?" As can be seen, the main point in the Heideggerian system is the question of being (die Seinsfrage). To that question Heidegger answers that "time is the truth of the

being". To put it more clearly, man is a being who exists in time, a temporal being who is perpetually "a presence".

Martin Heidegger's "interpretation of the time as horizon of any comprehension of the being" 1 has opened the door to the doctrine of existentialism in 1927. For the existentialist thinker, man is a being-in-the-world (in-der-welt-sein) whose existence is a proj ect, a being who can invent himself at any time of worry. Though we do not sense it because of common habit, we usually invent ourselves when we ~e worried in front of difficult situations and think out to tind a solution. It is within that little instant (der Augenblick) that man frees himself from his world and discovers new avenues for his actions.

With su ch a freedom, man cannot remain as a mere subject in History, but he can create his own history.

T 0 round off, Martin Heidegger is the tirst philosopher who has tried a metaphysical approach of existentialism. The description he made of human

existence is aIl the more pessimistic since he reveals to man the factitious and derelict nature of the world as it i~. It is up to man to create values out of that

chaos. His detinition of man in early 1927: "the essence of the being lies in his existence" announces the existentialleitmotiv: " existence precedes essence".

AlI the philosophies of existence trying to put the stress on the unyielding nature of hum an existence will have special echo during the Second W orld War period. When the war ended in May 1945, following the capitulation of the German army, we are still very far from the great euphoria which has marked the end of the first World War in November 1918. The main reason is that the

loss is also considerable: fifty-fiv~ million dead (55 million) for one hundred million 'wounded (100 million);' the European economy is finally ruined. Moreover, the events which have followed the end of the War, in that year 1945, bring much more trouble than comfort, mainly the discovery of concentration camps with their concerted system of extermination by the Nazis. The explosion of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, even if it marks the last step of the W ar, will open the new age of apocalyptic destruction, and engage humanity in a collective suicide. The division of the world initiated by Joseph Stalin, Theodore

Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill at Yalta in 1945, creates not the conditions of a lasting peace but rather opens the era of cold war. As Jean-Paul Sartre said it: "The war has ended in indifference and anguish ( .... ) Peace has not started yet" Henceforth, images of "night and despair" will haunt minds, so that a certain conception of man, familiar to the humanist tradition, drops before such revelations. The War period is one of chaos and pessimism, and the collapse of

Even before the term existentialism has been broadly used, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has started his satire of contemporary optimism. Playwright and essayist who bases his literary work on a philosophical thought influenced by German phenomenologists like Karl Ja~pers, he makes remarkable beginnings with Nausea (1938) and a collection of short- stories The Wall

(1939) ; those two works which are excellent testimonies about the anguish of the pre-war periods, show some Sartrian metaphysi&al themes : the feeling that

everything becomes absurd in the light of death, the impression of gratuit y in front of events, the denunciation of "bad faith" in the people who try to justify their existence by reassuring values, fear of a humanism which believes in the univers al man and not in the man in situation. As a consequence, the tendency of laying the stress on absolute values in literature has changed for a humanism

based on man's responsibility and commitment into History. It is not necessary to ask whether History has a meaning and if we can participate in it; but as we

are already living in the world, we must try to give it a meaning by doing our best and struggle for it. The existentialist writers want to favour the historical

Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea is a kind of metaphysical novel whose main theme is that life means nothing if you don't have a goal to achieve. Written in the form of a diary kept by Antoine Roquentin, it narrates the story of a man who is preparing a historical book on the eighteenth-century politician M.de

Rollebon. From time to time, Antoine Roquentin gets the sudden feeling of gratuit y and absurdity of life, so he names that crisis Nausea. He progressively discovers that the Nausea is a real metaphysical anguish caused by the fact that everything that exists is irreducible to reason. ln the same vision, Albert Camus has pub lished his novel The Strânger in 1942 and his treatise The myth of Sisyphus in 1943 which are two images of negation and absurdity. ln the first work, the hero MeursauIt is a modest clerk who denounces social conformism

(he is curiously indifferent to beings and things), discovers the absurd and engages himself into a modem tragedy, aIl developed in a neutral and objective tone. As far as The Myth of Sisyphus is concemed, Camus precises that the notion of the absurd must not be a simple observation, but a tension and a refusaI like the revoIt of the Greek king SisXPhus condemned to roll

continuously a rock up to the hill. Camus' conception of the absurd is the opposition or the perpetuaI tension between human need of order and reason,

and the spectacle of disorder and injustice offered lry the world. ln his Caligula

(1944) where the absurd becomes a raving anguish before the misfortune of humanity, the mad emperor changed into a god will declare: "It is impossible to understand destiny, that is why I decide to be a destiny."

AlI those works render a new sound: the expression of despair is too pathetic, the loneliness of the hero is too absolute, they don't take part in society which they denounce as absurdo Roquentin in The Nausea, the madman in The Wall, Meursault and his mythic double Sisyphus, Caligula will never be fully integrated into socjety. They stress the necessity for each man to invent his way and create himself his existence. Duties, laws external to man, and any other maxim forced upon him lead to the enslavement of the individual. F ollowing that tradition, Simone de Beauvoirpublished her first novel The Guest in 1943, another metaphysical novel whicho dramatises in an existential way the problem of individual communication: the heroine Françoise kills her guest Xavière out of jealousy. ln the same year , her friend Jean-Paul Sartre expands the doctrine

of existentialism in a voluminous philosophical work Being and Nothingness : man, born out of nothing, can't find any value that provides him a goal to be achieved; he is an existence and has no essence a priori; but instead of finding despair in that nothingness, he must rather be aware of his freedom and the importance of his acts which, once accomplished, will definitely define him.

By 1 945's existentialism chânges its first face of despair and negation of univers al values to become a doctrine open to hope and expectation. During a

conference he held in 1945, Sartre announces that "existentialism is a humanism". With its second face, existentialism turns on man's effort to create

positive values in society, and therefore appears as the "hope of the desperate". The Plague by Albert Camus and the trilogy Strides Toward Freedom by Jean Paul Sartre try to express through allegorical forms the new humanism which refuses to shrink before historical catastrophes.

Issued from Kierkegaard's meditations in the nineteenth century, existentialism has found art and literature to be unusually effective methods of expression. ln the novels and plays by Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoïevski, Albert Camus, Simone de

Beauvoir, Samuel Becket, Jean-Paul Sartre to name but a few, it has found the most persuasiye media.

To have a clear idea of existentialist literature, which is the broad topic of our research paper, it will be helpful to look for the main tenets or principles characterising the doctrine of existentialism.

EtymologicaIly, existentialism is derived from the adjective "existential" (derived itself from the substantive "existence") to which is added the suffix "ism". That very suffix "ism" generally indicates the primacy of the preceding morpheme: individualism gives priority to the individual; and socialism gives priority to society. Therefore, existentialism appears as a doctrine giving priority to existence. But what is existence? It is difficult to give a precise answer, for existence is not an attribute but the reality of aIl attributes : l am not

taIl, blond, smoker and existing; bût l am taIl, blond, smoker only if l exist. We can grasp existence in the existing' individual not in the existence itself. Indeed, existence is not a state of being, it is an act; the passage from possibility to reality : to exist is to move from what it is (ex) and to reach (sistere) what is

possible. A concrete image of the existence is available in Sartre's Nausea (pages 165, 166) where the hero Roquentin expresses some reflections on the

There are a number of guiding principles common to the doctrine of existentialism.

presence III the world. Some people believe that essence cornes first and existence cornes afterward... That classical conception originates from the

religious tradition that God created man. Before creating man, God must have an idea of the kind of being He wants to create : the essence first, then the

existence. They believe that there is an essence common to every man, which is called human nature; that essence determines man' s action. As the Greek philosopher Plato said it in Phedon, the essences are the sources of the beings; they preexist to the apparition of all the beings in the world, so existence is the imitation of the original essence. ln that perspective, man is submitted to a strict

determinism. For the doctrine of existentialism, however, existence precedes essence, and essence will never join existence except in death. If we take for example the object we make or manufacture, their conception precedes their realisation. The artisan is inspired by the concept of basket in order to make it;

no artisan can produce a basket without representing in his mind the image of a basket, without referring to it. So the essence (here the image of basket) precedes the existence (the basket itself). But there is a being in which the

existence precedes the essence, a being which exists before any concept: man. At the outset, man is nothing; there is no human nature since there no God to conceive it. You cannot de fine man at first; it is only through his actions that you know the type of man he is. Man exists at first, arises, is found in the world,

and is defined afterward. Man is nothing more than what he does or makes of himself. ln human beings and only in hum an beings, existence precedes essence. Therefore, existence is the privilege of man and not of the other beings.

Secondly, man chooses his essence. Not having distinguished the univers al essence that makes man in gèneral from the individual essence that

makes a particular man (shy or daring, upright or dishonest), the doctrine of existentialism concludes that man must create himself his own essence. It is true that 1 am a man, but which type of man do 1 want to become? Even if 1 cannot choose a priori my social class, my height and my intelligence, the attitude 1

adopt in front of these contingencies depends on me. "Each man decides of the sense of his life, it is he who takeshis conditions up to success or failure" 1. l can be a disabled person from birth, but my infirmity goes with the way l bear it: as

"intolerable", "humiliating", "to be concealed", "to be disclosed to everyone", "a reason of my pride", "a justification of my failures" etc. The attitude l adopt vis

à-vis my conditions contributes to transform myself. l can be ugly or handsome, poor or rich, these are factual data against which l have no power; however l can accept or reject these essences. Life can have meaning and purpose if the individual so will it by his own reason and determination. It is then clear that

Many people identifying themselves with public opinion or using equally weIl the French pronoun "on" ("man" as Heidegger said in German) don't have an authentic existence. For Sartre, Karl Jaspers and Heidegger, the person who exists authenticaIly is the one who makes a free choice, who can realise himself, who is his own creation. "1 want to count only on myself' said Daniel in Sartre's

~ut it is not sufficient to have made a choice is not aIl. Once your choice is made, you must not contend with it and stay still. The existing individual who stabilises himself on the type of man he wants to become hardens and ceases to exist. It is not possible to fix oneself~on a definite position, for existence is a

constant transcendance and a continuaI overcoming. To exist is to choose to be more than you are. It is important to observe that man is the only being who is able to choose; the other beings are predetermined. For example, the seed preexists to the tree, and aIl the transformations a tree ~will undergo through seasons are predictable. On the contrary, man can choose out of many facing possibilities a particular when situation. It is only after his choice that you know what he has

reaIly chosen and what the choice has made of him. The only way l have to choose my essence is to adopt one particular attitude instead of another in front

of a situation. It is a choice which concems my own life and the life of the whole
community altogether. Man constructs the univers al by choosing his essence and

the ^~ThirdY,_usual^man_detinition^is of the ^condemned_word.^to_First^be_of^ITee._aIl,^That there is ^unlimited no authority ^ITeedom_imposing^surpasses a code of behaviour on man. For example in The Flies by J-P Sartre (Act III,

scene II) Orest retorts to Jupiter who is asking from him obedience: "...You should not have created me free ( .. ) No sooner have you created me than l have

again : l' m submitted to no law but mine ( ... ) For l am a man, Jupiter, and each man has to invent his way". The ways of man depend on his goals and his hierarchy of values. Since our goals command our choices, the free choice of

our goals leads to the liberty of our particular resolutions. That freedom is aIl the more safeguarded as our goals are never detinitely achieved. ln so far as we continue to exist, we keep on choosing our goals, for freedom is the essence of our existence. ln the face of any occasion of choice we can calI in question our

previous choice, so that any decision taken in conformity with it can be considered as a renewal of that choice.

How are we going to choose our goals or aims? To choose between honour and pleasure, between my interest and the interest of others, l need to

make a discemment with a guiding principle. The Epicurean philosopher who centres the goal of his life on pleasure, the altruisY who sees no other reason for

living except devoting himself to his fellowmen, like the Christian who seeks nothing more than the" glory of God" pretend to link their moral system to an imposing principle which has nothing with a personal free choice. Anyhow, even if the principle of discemment is motivated, the existentialists are not

stopped by that perspective. Having rejected essences and similar concepts, they logically corne to the conclusion that even the motive of our action is

independent. Man adopts a particular attitude with no good reason, he makes himself "without any point of support" 1; he goes by no reason. Each person sets freely his norms of God, Evil and Beauty. René Descartes had attributed that

power to God, but Sartre and the existentialists give it to man. "By attributing the free will to God, Descartes has given God what is man's prerogative", he

argued. That absolute liberty which invents Reason and Good and has no other limits than itself is assumed by man. But it is important to notice that the deep choice which determines our daily decisions makes one thing with the consciousness we have of ourselves. Moreover, that liberty is not the privilege of my wilful actions alone. My emotions and my passions are also independent. There is no privileged phenomenon as far as my liberty is concemed. For example, my fear is independent and it proves my freedom, for 1 have put all my liberty in my fear and 1 have chosen to be fearful in such and such situations. Therefore, everything in our psychological or interior life is liberty. To act freely is to decide without any motive, but to set the motives as the goal or project of our actions. That project is neither in Heaven nor on Earth but it is man himself because he lives subjectively his project subjectively and is the unique person who is able to know about it. If we consider the structure "motive-intention-actgoal", the free will act is an absurd act. It is absurd because it is not motivated, it

The absence of determinism justifies that man is totally free. He has behind and before him no values, no justification or no excuse; he is alone and

condemned to be independent. He must search for ways and means to survive in a hostile world where nothing is controlled. That is to say, man's existence is the constant exercise of his freedom, the perpetuaI effort to surpass his situation.

Man is always in a "suspended sentence" and his survival depends on his efforts to face it. By a personal decision man can reject his past, reinvent and reorient

his life. ln other words, man is what he will be, he is not what he is; his actuality is provisory value to be surpassed;'

Fourthly, man is responsible for his actions. The existentialist's responsibility extends further than his actions, he is responsible for every action happening in the world. Nothing escapes his responsibility, neither his personal actions nor the events exterior to him. For example, as a man l' m responsible

for W orld War II even if l have not caused it. l' m responsible for everything in the sense that by posing free acts, l assume the responsibility for everything happening in the world. l have not asked my parents to give me birth, but the attitude l adopt vis-à-vis my birth (shame or pride, optimism or pessimism...) shows that l have chosen to be bom in a certain sense. For example, through his lamentations on the dunghill: "why haven't l died in my mother's womb"\ Job chooses to be bom because if he had not been bom he couldn't have moaned and

damned his birthday. Likewise, l cannot regret the war massacres if they have not happened, but by regretting them l have taken them as a part of my existence and assumed them. What happens to man or his fellowmen is surely human. No situation is inhuman in so far as the most horrible situation, the worst torments never create inhuman situation. It is only by fear, flight and other extreme

The responsibility that the doctrine of existentialism wants man to assume extends the common signification of the word. Ordinarily, we are responsible

the existentialist perspective, there is nothing of the sort: even if we do not willingly decide an action, we are responsible for it. That responsibility is inexplicable, wantonly, and absurdo The univers al character ofthat responsibility is contained in the fact that man's actions surpass him and belong to the whole humanity. That is why we are always happy whenever any man accomplishes a famous progress for humanity; we feel the same satisfaction like the author's. ln

the same way, when somebody does wrong we usually condemn the wrongdoer
and his social class at the same time; we are also deeply affected when we hear

about genocide, massive killings, certain abominations. It is important to notice that the responsible man is the one who is invested with a mission; he discharges it and considers it as an image of rus ITee-will. It is in that sense that we

understand someone who is engaged in a war and lives up to his decision despite the critics of other people. He deserves it because he could have shrunken back

by committing suicide or deserting but, instead, he has chosen that war and decided for its existence.

Fifthly, man is anguished by his existence. That anguish results ITom the immediate sense of meaninglessness that human beings have of their situation. Indeed, the existing individual chooses his own norms without a prior judgement of value. He is worried about his choice since it engages the whole world.

he assumes the responsibility of the entire human race, since there is neither value nor moral given us a priori and for each choice we must decide al one without any support or guide, why can't we feel anxious about our

the world and the place of man in the universe.(...) why can't we be seized by fear in ITont of such an entire

How can we justify the existentialist hypothesis of anguish? Despite our good will, we cannot find satisfying answer to that question. Previously to our

choice, there is neither authority .imposing upon us a choice nor a range of values offered for our choice. "1 could do what 1 wanted. Nobody has the right to

advise me, there is no Good, no Evil, except the ones that 1 invent myself.", protested Mathieu Delarue in The Age of Reason. ln these conditions, why shall

1 fear to make the wrong choice? Indeed, there is no justification of the existentialist anguish. Our effort to discover the real cause of this "feeling of

anguish" is vain: that anguish is absurd and lays on nothing like the feeling of responsibility itself. This anguish is absurd for the simple reason that the world

Sixthly, man engages himself through his actions. Engagement shows man's commitment into the world : once he takes a decision, he makes it his

own, and struggles for it. The existentialist tenet of engagement is opposed to the attitude of immobilism, which requires man to accept his situation with indifference. The existentialist approach of engagement goes beyond the common engagement in politics or religion. ln the passive sense, engagement is the fact of being engaged and inserted into a system on which one is dependent. For example, due to my birth l' m engaged into the world. ln the active sense, engagement expresses the act of choosing a situation that pleases us. For

example, due to my birth l' m engaged into the world (the first type of engagement) but 1 realise the second type of engagement by choosing to serve

the army or any other cause. ln the real use',()f the word, both meanings go together. We are passively engaged in the world, and because of that first

engagement we actively engage ourselves vis-à vis the situations in the world. It is no use wondering why we must commit ourselves to a particular action, provided that the engagement goes with a free-will and is destined for the wellbeing of mankind. Nothing greater is achieved, without a higher degree of engagement.

Seventhly, the feeling of absurdity is centred on the existentialist vision of the world. Life, is life worth living? That fundamental question arises from the "nausea" put into man by the medianical structure of the existence: "waking up,

4 hours at office, meal, sleeping and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and Saturday on the same rhythm... One day cornes when we ask "why" and everything starts out of that weariness" 1 The discovery of the absurd also arises

from the queemess of the world, the hostility of nature in which we feel strangers. Even our reason, acknowledging its incapacity to understand the world, tells us that the world is absurd and irrational. The absurd may also arise from the fact that each day of our life is stupidly dependent on the following

one, whereas time is our worst enemy. At last, it is the certitude of death , that elementary and definite side of huinan adventure in the world which inspires us the absurdity of living. The real is absurd and has no meaning for itself, that is why each one gives it the meaning he wants. As a matter of fact, it is not the world itself which is absurd but it is the comparison of its irrational nature with

man's desire of clarity. The absurd is neither in man nor in the world, but in their common presence or antagonism.

Since the drama of absurdity makes one with human existence, any solution for that problem must preserve the notion of absurdo That is why, the doctrine of existentialism challenges aIl the solutions skipping the absurdity of the world, mainly suicide and religion. ln fact, committing suicide is an easy way to suppress the consciousness of the absurd, and religion places outside the

world the hopes and expectations that would give sense to life. On the contrary, the existentialists want man to live only with what he knows that is the

existentialist faces the world and challenges the absurdity of his situation: he accepts his destiny entirely. For Albert Camus, the prototype of the absurd man is Sisyphus : the gods have condemned him to roll a rock up to a mountain top

from where the heavy stone will fall down again; by being aware of the vanity of his efforts, Sisyphus rises above his punishment; by accepting his destiny

Sisyphus bases his grandeur on the struggle. The absurd hero is happy. As can be seen, the awareness of the absurd leads to independence.

Eighthly, the doctrine of existentialism is a humanism . Criticising the traditional form of humanism which takes man as purpose and absolute value,

the existentialists oppose a humanism based on hum an dignity. ln that vision, man is concemed with the farthest events as well as the nearest ones, the

individual actions as well as collective dramas for he is entirely responsible for the whole world. He has the heavy responsibility to realise a more hum an

uni verse. That humanism is built on the notion that man is the only being capable of altruism, of pure love above the restrictive sphere of instinctive, familial, and sexual affection. The existential view can assert the possibility of improvement. Most pessimistic systems find the source of their despair in the

fixed imperfections of human nature or the human context; the existentialist, however, denies all absolute principles and holds that human nature is fixed only in that we have agreed to recognise certain human attributes; it is therefore subject to change if human beings can hope for aid in making such alterations only from within themselves. Man is the future of man.

It is no longer possible to c(~mceive humanity as a great being into which the plurality of individuals would be melted and be restored, because the transhistorical dimension of man enables him to mark the existence with his imprints. The existentialist humanism will be realised only when each man becomes conscious that his existence depends on himself and on the others.

"Each one is al one and nobody can go without the others, there is no common life which releases us of the burden of ourselves and spares us to have an opinion. And there is no interior life which

ln The Plague by Albert Camus, the characters learn the necessity of solidarity in the face of a common epidemic. The novel shows that man can't

survive alone and that his destiny is linked to the others. Since he admits that life is absurd and unjust, it's up to him to give it a meaning and create a little justice: "what balances the absurd is the community of men struggling against it" said Camus in 1945.

Ninthly, the atheistic existentialists do not conceive any God transcending human existence. Their main argument is the contradicting notion of a Being which exists by itself or causa sui: to build Its own existence, He must have existed before , which is obviously contradictory. Moreover, there is a rilv~ between the existence of God and that of man: the existence of one excludes the existence of the other, and vice versa. If God exists, man is not free; but it is in the essence of man to be free, therefore God does not exists. Subsequently, the existing individual takes the place of the presumed God for he is the only creator

of values in the uni verse. "Since 1 suppress God the Father, there must be somebody to invent the values ..." observed Sartre. The non-existence of God is the logical consequence of the existence of man; - which reminds us of Nietzsche's "God is dead"

The negation of the existence of God leads to a radical individualism. However, the doctrine of existentialism does not kill God in the way of vulgar atheists : they do not reject God for the pleasure of it. They evacuate God from the world just to let man takes the responsibility for his destiny. ln other words,

if the belief in God is to threaten man's freedom, He cannot exist; if the existence of God must be prior to the existence of man, He cannot exist. Their

Creator. Having rejected the existence of God, the doctrine of existentialism also rejects guiding principles, systems, ideologies, and any moral exterior to man;

Richard Wright's novels Native Son and The Outsider illustrate that existentialist vision oflife in the particular context ofhis time and society.

ln Native son, Richard Wright portrays Bigger Thomas, the stereotypical "nigger", by using the tenets of naturalism and existentialism. If as the naturalists contend, physiological conditions, environmental influences and circumstances determine human personality, so that human beings are the products of their environment, then Native Son indicates that Bigger Thomas responds to environmental forces he cannot controi.

But here for the scope of our study, we are not concemed with naturalism in the novel, but we will present Bigger Thomas as an existentialist hero. For the meaninglessness of Bigger's existence is at one with the existential philosophy. When, at the end of the novel, Bigger says , "But what l killed for, l am" he is accepting responsibility for his action. He is ultimately responsible for his actions and must be held accountable. By killing, Bigger has carved out an identity for himself; by destroying, he has created. For the first time in his life he is somebody

a murderer. The word "murderer" is appropriate, since Bigger convinces himself after Mary's accidental death that he really intended to kill her.

ln order to show how far Bigger Thomas is an existential hero, we will focus our attention on his immediate physical and psychological environment. Indeed, Bigger is trapped in a hostile environment made of white domination, Chicago's ghetto, and the weakness of the Thomases' family. Then we will examine Bigger's emancipation or struggle for freedom after the accidental killing of Mary Dalton.

And last , we will refer to his religion and show that, in a true existentialist fashion, he scoms religion and the Christian faith.