Abstract
This essay examines Richard Wright’s 1953 novel The Outsider as a fully realized existentialist work, arguing that it stands alongside Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s Nausea as one of the clearest statements of twentieth-century existentialism. The paper traces the development of protagonist Cross Damon’s existentialist consciousness—his sense of radical freedom, dread, and the rejection of both religion and Communist ideology—and concludes that, despite Wright’s own denial of the existentialist label, The Outsider articulates the central tenets of the philosophy, including the freedom to recast and reforge the self and the inescapable responsibility to others.
Keywords: Richard Wright, existentialism, The Outsider, Cross Damon, Sartre, Kierkegaard, freedom, dread
Introduction
The Outsider (1953) is Richard Wright’s most explicitly existential novel, a novel born, as it was, less than a decade after Jean-Paul Sartre “burst into fame in October 1945.” In a letter to Gertrude Stein, dated 28 March 1946, Wright wrote, “New York is buzzing over existentialism. It frightens most folks here. Too gloomy, they say.” But as is evident in Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), Wright knew gloom well; it was an emotion he would soon give name to: existentialist dread. In the summer of 1947, the year he would sail for France, Wright read The Concept of Dread, in which Kierkegaard wrote, “dread is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away.” This line would appear as the epigraph to The Outsider, a book which stands alongside Camus’s The Stranger and Sartre’s Nausea as one of the clearest statements of the 20th century’s most influential philosophy.
Cross Damon and the Existentialist Self
Unlike the protagonist of The Outsider, Cross Damon, who, due to a freak subway accident, is given the chance to recreate himself and “do with himself what he would, what he liked,” Bigger Thomas’s choices are limited. Cross Damon’s life, though, is manifestly different. While Damon, like Bigger, is “a man standing outside of the world,” his “intuitive sense of freedom” compels him to “create a new life” as a man with “no party, no myths, no tradition, no race.” Damon’s realization that “he was free” comes after he is believed to have been killed in an accident in the Chicago subway.
Here Damon expresses the central tenets of existentialism: “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself” (Sartre, “Existentialism” 15); “man is nothing else than his plan” (32); “man chooses his own self” (17); “man is condemned to be free […] Therefore, [the existentialist] thinks that man, with no support and no aid, is condemned every moment to invent man” (23). Damon refuses to believe his life was “spared” because such a belief “implied that some God was watching over him, and he did not believe that. It was simply the way the dice had rolled.”
Dread, Freedom, and the Rejection of Religion and Communism
Cross Damon’s overwhelming sense of dread—or what Heidegger calls “forlornness”—comes from his knowledge that, since “God does not exist,” we “have to face all the consequences of this.” Damon’s dread is, in this sense, inescapable. He knows that “we realize our freedom to its fullest extent when we experience the state of mind called dread.”
Early in the novel, Cross wishes he could embrace religion. He watched his mother “driven […] into the arms of religion for the sake of her sanity.” Religion, he saw, assuaged the grief born of “her own experience” and “thwarted hopes.” Cross thinks his “mother was lucky; she had a refuge, even if that refuge was an illusion.”
Unlike his mother, Damon is unable to make what Kierkegaard called “the leap of faith” that would “placate his sense of dread.” Damon is unwilling to make the leap, so he does not have the luxury of believing “that there was another world into which he could somehow escape when he died.”
In The Outsider the Communist party embodies values inimical to individual freedom. Throughout the novel, Damon’s “decisive life struggle [is] a personal fight for the realization of himself.” As Gil tells Damon, “we Communists do not admit any subjectivity […] [Y]ou are an instrument of the Party. You exist to execute the Party’s will.” Damon rejects Communism because it subordinates individual will to a party platform. But in rejecting Communism, Damon is not dismissing the importance of “human solidarity.”
The Responsibility to Others
Brignano, then, is incorrect to suggest The Outsider “in fact rejects the very existential precepts that the book’s main character lives by.” It is clear, though, that Damon knows “he had to become human before he could mingle again with people. Yet he needed those people and could become human only with them.” At the end of the novel, as Damon lays dying, Houston asks him what he found in life, and Damon answers: “Nothing […] The search can’t be done alone […] Never alone […] Alone a man is nothing […] Man is a promise that he must never break […] I wish I could ask men to meet themselves […] We’re different from what we seem […] Maybe worse, maybe better […] But certainly different […] We’re strangers to ourselves.”
Damon’s view here is entirely consistent with Sartrean existentialism. As Sartre writes, “when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.” While Richard Wright denied he was an existentialist, The Outsider, nevertheless, articulates its central tenets, among them, the freedom to recast and reforge the self, and in this, lies its optimism.