The Outsider by Richard Wright

First published: 1953

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Naturalism

Time of work: 1951

Locale: Chicago, Illinois; New York, New York

Principal Characters

• Cross Damon, the protagonist, age twenty-six, a black intellectual
• Bob Hunter, a Pullman-car waiter and member of the Communist Party
• Ely Houston, a hunchbacked New York City district attorney
• Gil Blount, a member of the Central Committee of the US Communist Party
• Eva Blount, the young wife of Gil Blount, a painter
• Jack Hilton, a power-hungry, ruthless Communist
• Herndon, a fascistic landlord

The Novel

Cross Damon’s wintry search for meaningfulness and happiness falls into five stages, omnisciently narrated in books of the novel entitled “Dread,” “Dream,” “Descent,” “Despair,” and “Decision.” By the time Cross reaches the fifth stage, no decision can stem the worsening of his life that is suggested by the first four titles.

When the story opens, Cross dreads everything about his intolerable life, which quickly comes to a crisis under pressure from his fifteen-year-old pregnant girlfriend, his abused wife, and his moralistic mother. Then the completely unexpected happens: He survives a subway accident and learns that a mangled victim has been identified as him. Cross takes this opportunity to create himself anew. Again, however, the unexpected happens: He is seen by a friend, and rather than return to a life made even worse, Cross kills him.

Cross’s life is now dreamlike, because he carries in his mind a twenty-six-year identity that he is consciously denying. He is only early in the process of inventing what he believes will be a new personality, and therefore he is at the mercy of external circumstances. An accident in the dining car of a train causes him to meet two people who will haunt him like images in a dream that turns into a nightmare. Bob Hunter entangles him in the Communist Party, and Ely Houston is insightful enough to recognize him as a fellow outsider inclined to “ethical lawlessness.” The style of Wright’s narration in this part of the story is not dreamlike, however, as philosophical analysis plays a major role in his narration and characterization.

In New York, Cross meets party members who claim to be rational, objective, and benevolent but whose only law is their purpose of domination. Cross, needing human contacts to give substance to his new identity, and believing that with his intelligence and existential freedom he is more than a match for anyone else, agrees to live with Gil and Eva Blount, in order to aid the Party’s challenge to the racist practices of their landlord, Herndon. Increasingly for Cross, the flow of ideas is the believable and sustaining fabric of life. He believes that he actually is his idea of himself. Paradoxically, however, the more he intellectualizes life, the more he rationalizes his behavior with philosophical excuses, and the more he is driven by his own dread and compulsions.

Thus Cross’s descent begins when, projecting ideas that threaten him onto other persons, he finds that those persons are, to his mind, ideas that offend him. Refusing existentially to go on living the bad faith of transcendental hope, he begins to share the Communists’ and fascists’ bad faith of exploitation through deception. Acting godlike, Cross appropriates absolute power, in the name of personal freedom and integrity, by killing Gil Blount and Herndon.

In despair over his discovery that, in exercising the freedom to create a new self, he has compulsively reenacted an ancient pattern of violent human behavior, Cross begins a love affair with Eva Blount, although he knows that she loves her image of him as an innocent victim. Ely Houston also prefers to think that Cross is innocent, rather than the kind of modern outlaw who would kill without need of transcendent justification for his act and without feeling transcendent judgment upon it. However, a combative Cross cannot resist his compulsion to taunt Houston with the assertion that “humanity is nothing in particular” and that, therefore, a human may be anything at all. Another Communist, Hilton, now becomes offensive to Cross, intending to exercise moral ownership of him. Immediately before Cross kills him, Hilton expresses the non-Marxist personal philosophy that life is not justifiable, but merely exists for no particular reason. Individuals, he says, should make life whatever they want it to be. Cross counters that human suffering proves that life has meaning. Indeed Cross almost kills Eva to save her from the suffering that she is sure to feel if she learns that he is a murderer. He is stopped by his love for her, which causes him to feel hope and to commit himself to her.

In the last book, Houston confronts Cross with evidence of his guilt in the murders. Cross says nothing, and Houston sends him home. There Cross makes the decision to confess to Eva, hoping that she will somehow understand and forgive; instead, she loses all remaining trust and hope and leaps from a window to her death. Party thugs shoot Cross; on his deathbed, he confesses to Houston that his life has been horrible, all the more so because he has felt his existential innocence. He has, however, also learned that persons must not alienate themselves from humanity, which is, in essence, a promise that must not be broken.

The Characters

Cross Damon, as his name implies, is the embodiment of a complex idea. Wright conceived of a man who has been martyred by his Christian upbringing and by the institutionalization of values based on Christian and other Western mythologies that have been rendered obsolete by industrialism, but also a man whose existentialist attempt to create a new and free identity merely frees his egoistic compulsion to replace the defunct Godhead with his own godlike exercise of power. Thus, he acts demonically, in the senses both of Satan and tormented demiurge. He is both driven and inspired to obliterate the enemies of human freedom, only to find that the more he defeats them, the more like them he becomes. He is a shockingly violent murderer who yet can claim to be innocent of transcendental and therefore societal guilt. Ironically, he re-creates himself as a heroic outsider, only to find that every other thoughtful person, law-abiding or not, is also an outsider.

As characters, these outsiders differ only inasmuch as the ideas that they embody differ. For example, the Communists are as free of traditional mythology, as violent, and as self-serving as is Cross, but their idea is to enslave, not to set free. Houston, the district attorney, is an “ethical criminal” like Cross, but any violence that he commits is within the law. Although Houston stands outside society in his personal and philosophical points of view, he chooses to conform to societal imperatives, because he knows that a sane human life requires community.

When Eva Blount experiences love and trust, she modifies her idea of meaningful art in the direction of community. It is through Cross’s experience of love, and of betrayal of trust, that he learns the necessity of community and commitment. It is then that he is fully able to appreciate the horror of his life, in its mixture of dread, compulsion, betrayal, and innocence. His deathbed confession of horror and hope seems as much the logical conclusion of his creator’s theory as the result of a heartfelt change in personal perspective.

As Richard Lehan and others have pointed out, Wright’s characterization repeats the naturalistic methods of his earlier fiction, especially Native Son (1940). Wright places Cross Damon in situations that illustrate Wright’s ideas that test and prompt his protagonist’s thoughts. Cross’s behavior then further illustrates Wright’s analysis, which is conveyed by his omniscient narration and by Cross’s self-analysis. At opportune times, Wright informs his readers of relevant ideas by having characters explain themselves or by having them confront Cross with questions, which he answers with lectures from his extensive reading. Actions that are not informed by philosophy are motivated by the most common creaturely drives. Cross tends, therefore, to careen from one extreme to another, and this state is reinforced by Wright’s imagery: The outer world is wintry, and the inner world, when aroused beyond dialectic, is like a furnace.

Nevertheless, the novel retains interest in spite of its artistic flaws because of the importance of its philosophical framework and struggle. Similarly, its characters are engaging because, although they are types, they are haunting in their representation of modern individuals, capable of—and even inclined toward—both petty and large destructions of life.

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