Chapters 15-16

(“The essence of the irony of the plight of the Negro in America, to me, is that he is doomed to live in isolation while those who condemn him seek the basest goals of any people on the face of the earth. Perhaps it would be possible for the Negro to become reconciled to his plight if he could be made to believe that his sufferings were for some remote, high, sacrificial end; but sharing the culture that condemns him, and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms to rolling in his soul.”)

In this part of the book Wright has moved from the South for the subtler North where blacks are not systematically terrorized, rather made to feel less than marginal. With the many jobs he takes and leaves, he has not been able to really have friends. He really starts to discover that what he is looking for is inside of him. These deep thoughts are in parentheses because it is something that he learns about later in his life and has a better understanding of the racial conflict that occurs. In this passage Wright realizes that the African American society is often looked down upon for having a different culture and are condemned because their differences of culture. It also mentions how the desire for material wealth blinds the society from the suffering of African Americans such as Wright. This really shows how his life situation didn’t improve a whole lot, but the he gained a better understanding of his position in society. By sharing these ideas in parentheses Wright is able to display what he has learned over the course of his life, and his opinions make the novel have a bigger effect on the reader.