Essay --

Richard Wright and William Faulkner both examine the psychologies of excluded members of society. While in ingrained Son, Wright studies someone oppressed and dgettrodden beneath society, Faulkner looks at a family of outsiders cast farthest away from a common community in As I Lay Dying. For both, a central question becomes the function of their characters minds in resemblance 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 articulatio traverses the gradient from realism to experimental fragmentation, Wright constructing a vertical consciousness, articulate and omniscient 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, momently interrupted by rebellious points of fragmented, modernis t language, reflects in form Biggers overwhelming repression doneout the novel and his liberating moments of agency. The naturalism contributes to a narrative utter that can articulate Biggers fears, impulses, and desires with much greater sophistry 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 whim swings are the result of his frustrated potential in a discriminate 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 pathetic or meaningless external existences. For the Bundrens, such vivid interiors, without constrictions, seem to jump from lack of compression, while f or Bigger, extreme downward pressure on his headland makes him a volatile character. By exploring this outcasts interiority through a vertical consciousness, Wright has proven the dangerous lack of agency a unfledged 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 commit control over their actions, but their actions, overshadowed, seem to hit no affects. By either being oppressed or ignored, both groups of people have damaged consciousnesses, in which they nevertheless discover some relief.