In Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy, the narrator frequently speaks of his intense physical hunger and the emptiness it brings him. While his physical hunger shapes his actions as a child, the severity of the emotional and cultural hunger that Richard will suffer later in life overrides these primal urges. Throughout his story, Richard expresses his difficulties linked to physical, mental and societal hunger, the different reactions that each evokes in him and the way in which he fights them. Filling his physical malnutrition is what keeps him alive, but his efforts to cure his mental hunger are what allows the reader to feel Richard's passion. This dichotomy exists throughout the novel, but Richard reacts to these hungers in different ways, and his different responses to physical hunger and mental hunger show his growth throughout the novel. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Part 1 of Black Boy follows Richard from his early childhood through his life as a young adult. It traces his family's personal and financial ups and downs, as well as his career, learning and societal understanding. At the beginning of the book, Richard is still a child and acts primarily to satisfy his primitive needs, primarily physical satiation. There are many situations in which Richard must fight, both mentally and physically, to get food and not go hungry. In one of the first scenes of the novel, Nathan, Richard's father, leaves his family for another woman. His mother, Ella, blames his departure on the family's sudden lack of food. Ella says that since he was the breadwinner, their options for supporting themselves are now limited. “'Your father isn't here now,' [Ella] said. “Where is he?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m hungry,” I groaned, tapping my foot. “You will have to wait until I find a job and buy food,” she said. As the days passed, the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and every time I felt hungry, I thought of him with deep biological bitterness” (16). Richard's father abandons his family, and they are forced to fight to survive. his absence so as not to be hungry. This causes Richard to develop an unpleasant association between his father and hunger. In this case, he is waging an emotional battle against the physical hunger he faces; he resents his father's selfishness and very quickly devalues ​​his relationship with him. This mental conflict with his father and his quest to satisfy his hunger set the tone for his struggle with food for most of his young life. With this first bad experience already in his memory, Richard's instincts to desperately search for food whenever possible increase greatly, as well as his willingness to fight back. This conflict continues when Ella later sends Richard to the grocery store, the group of boys attack him. She sends him away and the boys rob him again, so she finally arms him with a stick to fight them off and tells him she will whip him if he returns empty-handed. “I was baffled. My mother told me to fight, something she had never done before… 'Don't come to this house until you've run these errands,' she said” (17). The certainty with which his mother encouraged him to fight showed him how urgent and desperate the need for food was. He manages to injure the other boys and thus demonstrates his willingness to physically fight for food. Richard suffers from their abuse so as not to be hungry and accepts thethreats from the boys' parents, but fights anyway. This episode pushes Richard's guard to be ready and subliminally trains his instinct to obtain food whenever possible, regardless of drastic measures. This instinct manifests itself when he moves to his Aunt Maggie's house in Arkansas, and he finally has the comfort of having food available to him. Even with this apparent feeling of reassurance, Richard still has the urge to steal food for later. He takes steps to hide food in case of imminent famine in the future, in order to allay his conditioned fear. Throughout his struggle with hunger, he told himself he would be content with even the smallest amount of food. However, when this opportunity to eat came his way, he was so used to starving and doing whatever it took to get full later, that he always hid the food even if it wasn't very necessary at the time. He was so accustomed to having to be sneaky and deceptive in order to survive, that he automatically assumed this role, even in less dire circumstances. Richard displays a new level of desperation when he decides to sell his poodle, Betsy, for a dollar in order to buy himself. a little food. Betsy was a gift from Professor Matthews, and when his potential client, a white woman, is unable to pay the full dollar he demands, he takes Betsy home. “I took Betsy and ran home, glad I didn’t sell her. But my hunger returned. Maybe I should have taken the ninety-seven cents? But it was too late now” (70). He struggled with the dilemma of whether to sell Betsy for the partial sum of ninety-seven cents or keep her, and he doubted himself after making his choice. A car quickly hit Betsy and Richard was torn between grief and anger. While he loved the dog and was sad to see it die, he was also angry that he couldn't sell it. Richard suffers these difficult emotional consequences and hates his hunger for causing him to lose his dog. In his starving situation, a live dog meant a chance to make money, and a dead dog is of no use. This insensitivity that comes over Richard frustrates him, because he wants to be emotionally sensitive, but he still feels that practicality is more important. These priorities are quickly reversed and Richard's actions change accordingly. This shift in priorities shifts Richard's focus from satisfying his physical needs to satisfying his societal desires. He takes steps to resolve his physical hunger out of desperation, but attempts to resolve his mental hunger out of passion. His thirst for societal relevance leads him to continue to step outside the black social comfort zone – by only doing things that are "socially acceptable" for African Americans – rather than locking him into a protective stupor like the lack of food. Out of maturity, Richard begins to sacrifice physical satiety to satisfy his mental, intellectual and social hunger. Richard engages in a new passion for knowledge, which encourages his willingness to sacrifice his most primitive needs. When Richard's mother ends her six-year alcoholism, he begins to experience a new thirst for intellect. He teaches himself to read by flipping through children's books and learns to count when a delivery boy teaches him, but rather than satisfying him, these skills only serve as taste and increase his appetite for more knowledge and answers. Richard finds Ella, the teacher who rents a room to Granny, reading Bluebeard and His Sevenwomen, and is very intrigued when she tells him about the novel. Granny, however, forbids this "devil's work" (39) in her house, because she believes that fiction is as morally bad as lies and sin. In defiance of Granny, Richard becomes secretly determined to read as many novels as possible. “Not knowing the end of the tale filled me with a feeling of emptiness, of loss. I was hungry for the vivid, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough, I would buy every novel in existence and read them for nourish this thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigues, for plots, for secrecy, for bloody murders” (40). Reading offered him an escape into this world that seemed far more fantastical than his own, and he was willing to fight to maintain that mystery. Even though Mamie is physically violent towards him and threatens to refuse meals, he secretly borrows Ella's books and tries to read them. Despite the possibility that he might be hungry, he greatly enjoys the experience of reading and learning, and he considers it more important to devour an intellectual feast than to satisfy his physical hunger. When Richard's mother becomes too ill to work, the neighbors offer him food, but he does not accept it, because he was "already so ashamed that so often in [his] life [he] had to be fed by foreigners” (86). If this had happened at the beginning of the novel, it is almost certain that he would have gladly accepted the food, but now he considers the mode of acquisition and its integrity. He sacrifices the chance to be fed to maintain his pride. He realizes that if he wants people to accept him socially as just another black boy, he has to prove to himself that he is better than that. This mature approach to improving socially shows that Richard is indeed changing, especially since this opportunity would have had no physical or financial cost for him. Richard continues to give up his income in place of his pride and social satisfaction. Richard's more mature priorities are demonstrated when he discovers that the newspaper he sells print for is publishing Ku Klux Klan propaganda. As much as he appreciates having an income to support himself with his peers, his social conscience takes over and he chooses to prioritize the relief of the pain of his conscience caused by racism rather than his physical pain linked to hunger . When he was younger, he probably would have looked past this demeaning factor of his job and continued working to finance his grocery bill. While working in the white family's household, the wife of the family mocks Richard when he says he aspires to be a writer, and he immediately quits. “As I walked through his house to the street, I knew I wouldn’t go back. The woman had assaulted my ego; she had assumed that she knew my place in life, what I felt, what I should be, and I resented her with all my heart” (147). Even though he knows he probably won't become a writer, Richard doesn't like it when his racist employer openly tells him that. He craves acceptance of his dreams and not ridicule from his class, and sacrifices the reward he receives from his work. Even though his job allowed him to feed himself, he chose to prioritize his social desires and his dignity over his salary. Earlier in the novel, he probably would have bitten his lip and brushed off her comments, but now that he valued his dignity more than his health, Richard realized that his teasing was worthless. the small salary he earned. believes that the reward..