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4.1 AVERAGE
4.1 AVERAGE
Much like Native Son, this book is a profound tragedy. My experience reading The Outsider was my ideal novel, where it was heady, intellectual, and thought provoking at the same time that it was a page turner. Cross Damon is a character I don't think I'll ever forget, and though the story is bleak, it feels revelatory of something worth knowing about the human experience. This is a character that exists outside of race, society, culture, politics, anything, but all of those factors have extreme impact on his identity in obtuse yet intriguing ways, and his existence apart from them allows us to gain insight about both them and humanity generally. Very big recommend.
I really love Richard Wright. I just read Black Boy/American Hunger and Native Son recently. Now onto this. This book felt a lot like Native Son. A lot of similar things take place to push the story forward, and the communists come back into play. This one feels like it was written when Wright was having issues with the party in his real life. The book is a clear condemnation of the power-hungry paranoia and toxicity of the communist party that was taking place at the time. Hopefully things have gotten better in today's communist party. This book also had some other creepy things in it at the start, like our main character having a relationship with a girl who was underage. It was a hard book to read for reasons like that, but I liked his portrayal of the problems within the communist party, and feel that he wrote this with the hopes that the party would get better. I love when Wright digs into the thought process of his characters, and when they have those intense conversations at the end of the book. That's the good stuff.
adventurous
dark
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Wright's prose is compelling enough. The plot moves along to keep interest. Like his other books, it gets bogged down with heavy handed ideology. Character become mouth pieces for authors philosophy.
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
I read this in college as part of an American lit class. Until then, I didn't realize how naive and sheltered a life I must've led. This book had a profound impact on my consciousness of what is racism in the US.
I had only known racism in the context of my less than two decades of life in how it pertained to my family and me. I'd seen it in action, but only from the perspective of an Asian immigrant in a very small, almost entirely white, lower middle class municipality. I'd encountered some racial slurs in Brooklyn, but I didn't understand them. And then we moved to the suburbs of NJ when I was eight. For ten years, I was told to go back to my country, interrogated about what and where Korea was on the map, told by veterans that they'd served in the Korean War and was expected to know what that meant (I really had no awareness because my parents refused to talk about it), and only ever temporarily befriended by people who wanted to use me for my homework or to cheat off of me on a test.
Even when I went to college, the first two years covered my graduation requirements and most of it was surface level analytical thinking - it was to ensure we had a broad education of the liberal arts basics. I took this American literature class after declaring my majors, one of which was English literature. It was a pivotal moment for me to realize how different racism is to people outside my own demographics. While the book took place in the 50s, I was able to recognize how little had changed since then, once my eyes and my mind opened up to listening to accounts from my fellow students. This book and the other works we read by Richard Wright (Native Son and Black Boy) are largely responsible for my internal sense of justice, why I seek activism and antiracism, why I donate to the causes I do, and why I vote the way I do in every election at every level of government.
This is the same review I'll be leaving for the other two books mentioned above. And I really need to reread all of them soon!
I had only known racism in the context of my less than two decades of life in how it pertained to my family and me. I'd seen it in action, but only from the perspective of an Asian immigrant in a very small, almost entirely white, lower middle class municipality. I'd encountered some racial slurs in Brooklyn, but I didn't understand them. And then we moved to the suburbs of NJ when I was eight. For ten years, I was told to go back to my country, interrogated about what and where Korea was on the map, told by veterans that they'd served in the Korean War and was expected to know what that meant (I really had no awareness because my parents refused to talk about it), and only ever temporarily befriended by people who wanted to use me for my homework or to cheat off of me on a test.
Even when I went to college, the first two years covered my graduation requirements and most of it was surface level analytical thinking - it was to ensure we had a broad education of the liberal arts basics. I took this American literature class after declaring my majors, one of which was English literature. It was a pivotal moment for me to realize how different racism is to people outside my own demographics. While the book took place in the 50s, I was able to recognize how little had changed since then, once my eyes and my mind opened up to listening to accounts from my fellow students. This book and the other works we read by Richard Wright (Native Son and Black Boy) are largely responsible for my internal sense of justice, why I seek activism and antiracism, why I donate to the causes I do, and why I vote the way I do in every election at every level of government.
This is the same review I'll be leaving for the other two books mentioned above. And I really need to reread all of them soon!
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This book gave me a lot of mixed feelings. I thought that it presented a lot of really great topics and philosophical ideas, particularly about existentialism and the relevance of political parties in the human world, but I was very frustrated by the blatant ableism and sexism. Granted, Wright wrote this in an era when both of these things were rampant, but as a contemporary reader, I found myself more interested in and repelled by those topics than anything else mentioned in the book.
I also thought the ending was a total cop-out... The last fifteen pages or so, after Houston opted to let Cross go, I felt like Wright chickened out of letting his "little god" go "free" and felt that he had to kill him, so he just tacked on a convenient ending. I was unimpressed.
I also thought the ending was a total cop-out... The last fifteen pages or so, after Houston opted to let Cross go, I felt like Wright chickened out of letting his "little god" go "free" and felt that he had to kill him, so he just tacked on a convenient ending. I was unimpressed.
This book has become a part of me in a way I never expected it to.