Haunted by innocence: the debate with Dostoevsky in Wright's 'other novel,' "The Outsider."

Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940) is widely recognized as a seminal work and one of the most influential texts in modern African-American literature. Margaret Walker Alexander suggests that Wright's influence on black writers parallels that of Gogol on nineteenth-century Russian writers: "Like the Russians, who say they have all come out of Gogol's 'Overcoat,' most of our writers have come out of Wright's cloak" (66). Although scholars acknowledge the power and significance of Native Son, most find its structure seriously flawed because, as Morris Dickstein comments, its final third "devolves into a curious but inert essay on a novel that has essentially ended" (192). Native Son also betrays Wright's ideological ambivalence between naturalism and existentialism and between collectivism and individual freedom, splits which result not in dynamic, dialectical tension but irresolution and even some contradiction. The conflicts evident in Wright's most famous novel, however, foreshadow their successful resolution in The Outsider (1953), which has been treated unfairly as Native Son's poor cousin.

Despite some positive reviews, The Outsider received the first predominantly negative reviews of Wright's career, and critics generally dismiss it as third-rate, half-baked existentialism and much more seriously flawed than Native Son. Michel Fabre admits that its ideological importance "rivals that of Native Son" (Reader xiii), but he finds the story "lacking in substance and human atmosphere, for which the hero's ideological dissertations are no substitute" (Quest 372). Darwin Turner finds the thought of the novel "more persuasive" than that of Native Son but its artistry defective, for the book "fails to evoke the emotional intensity" of Wright's earlier work and lacks its "aura of uniqueness, originality, and artless spontaneity" (163). Like many critics, David Bakish objects to the novel's "plentiful" polemical interruptions and its plot bordering on "the melodramatic" (65). Edward Margolies sees Cross Damon as little more than "an intellectualized Bigger" (120) in a failed novel. For Russell Brignano, the novel has gained attention more because of its categorization as existential "than because of any aesthetic merits" (155). Robert Felgar concludes that, because of its "flaccid" prose and other faults, The Outsider and most of Wright's later works "do not warrant thorough examination because they compare so utterly unfavorably with Native Son" (iii).

Critical evaluation frequently and appropriately judges the success of one work according to the standard set by another of an author's works. But from these representative comments it seems that many critics required of the later novel not just the quality of Native Son but also conformity to its emotional tone and a repetition of its unique effects; in short, many seem displeased that Wright did not attempt to write another Native Son. In The Outsider the protagonist's race is of relatively minor significance in Wright's effort to offer a more explicitly universal theme. James Baldwin's second novel, Giovanni's Room, in which he depicts all non-black characters, is similarly undervalued, largely because of the general critical attempt to restrict black writers to black characters and "race" issues. Part of the overwhelming critical disappointment at Wright's second novel maybe due to this confining attitude. Since black writers often are criticized from both sides of the race issue - i.e., both for art that confronts social inequities (under the charge of "mere protest") and for art that probes universal concerns more explicitly (under "abandonment" of social commitment) - it is understandable that the writers need to preserve their independence from such ideological mandates and that this need is sometimes realized in works which transgress artificially constructed boundaries. Objecting to the "stagnation" (6) prevalent in Wright scholarship, in which "too many scholars believe Wright was at his best when he wrote out of the anger" (5) of his experiences as a child and a young man, Joyce Ann Joyce identities this obsessive concern with judging the merits of a work of African-American literature through the prism of race. In Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy, Joyce argues that "numerous misconceptions" haunt Wright's novels. "Serious impediments to new, discerning studies of his works" have evolved from "the idea that Wright's creativity resulted primarily from his experiences in Mississippi and the implication that his political ideology was more important to him than the 'sedentary toil' which, so Yeats maintained, must go into great works" (27).

The Outsider has some serious artistic problems, most notably the rambling disquisitions, heavy use of coincidence, and (aside from the protagonist) weak character development. However, it is no more, and probably less, melodramatic than Native Son, which features powerful but typically Wrightian scenes of somewhat sensationalized violence, including the decapitation of the dead Mary Dalton in the furnace and Bigger's brutal murder of Bessie Mears, whose skull he smashes with a brick. The violence and suspense in The Outsider are central to Cross's story, and their details are neither gratuitous nor lurid. In a sense the novel provides higher emotional intensity than Native Son, focusing not just on fear, flight, and capture but on an tuner journey filled with dread and a confrontation with the darkest human impulses to be discovered in the self.

The few voices comprising the minority opinion on The Outsider are mostly mixed in their assessment. For example, Nick Aaron Ford finds the novel "inferior to its predecessor in plot construction, organization, and emotional depth" (147), but he also sees it as "more imaginative, more challenging, and more philosophical" (143) and concludes that "Wright has come a long way in the art of philosophic thought since Native Son" (148). Contrary to many who argue that the style of The Outsider is forced and weak, Ford notes that "the vivid diction, the effective sentence structure, and the pleasing rhythms are still predominant" (148). Kingsley Widmer claims that, although the novel ultimately fails, "it does achieve some wisdom" (180) and is Wright's most thoughtful and most interesting novel (173-74). Among Widmer's observations is that, while "all of Wright's books" are melodramatic, melodrama is appropriate to "philosophically insistent literature, as in Marlowe, Dostoevsky, and Sartre" (175). Probably the highest praise for the novel comes from Nathan A. Scott, Jr., who recognizes the novel's imperfections but holds that it is "yet (after Black Boy) his finest achievement and ... a book that deserves to have commanded a great deal more attention than it has" (158).

But despite the lack of critical respect and serious attention paid to it, The Outsider succeeds as a narrative of highly effective, sustained tension and as a sophisticated exploration of philosophical ideas. Despite its occasional "homiletic essays" (Kinnamon 108), containing the somewhat long-winded philosophizing of Cross and district attorney Ely Houston, the novel's structure provides suspense over Cross's fate and the extremes of his self-assertion as well as thematic interest in his evolving awareness of the horror of his actions. The Outsider in fact can be said to achieve greater power, complexity, and consistency than the much more lauded Native Son. For with The Outsider Wright resolves the conflicts of Native Son, finally devaluing collectivism and naturalism and developing a more complex, dialectical approach to individual freedom as both an absolute necessity and an oppressive burden. Cross Damon has far greater opportunity to exercise his freedom than Bigger Thomas does, and Cross grows in parallel fashion but to a greater degree, gaining respect for himself by making choices rather than extorted promises. He accepts an early absolute freedom more intoxicating, but also much more onerous, than either Bigger's entrapment by environment and society or his rather qualified freedom. Because Cross is not predominantly a victim of race or environment, he is a more universal protagonist and a more complete existential figure, facing not simply an unjust society but a meaningless universe, and creating his identity and values out of that void.

Given the prevailing critical attitude toward Wright's "other novel," it should not be surprising that little investigation of the influences on the text has been done, aside from Fabre's discussion of "how little" the French existentialists influenced The Outsider (World 9). Close examination of the novel reveals a striking number of direct borrowings from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, along with several thematic convergences and variances between the two writers. The full-length studies of Wright essentially neglect this important connection with minimal observations of a certain similarity, and only two articles touch on it. Dasha Culic Nisula sketches some general thematic and structural similarities between the works of Dostoevsky and Wright, while Tony Magistrale briefly examines the environmental parallels between Native Son and Dostoevsky's novel but omits any treatment of the more numerous parallels with The outsider. In fact, both Native Son and The outsider demonstrate the considerable influence of Dostoevsky generally and of Crime and Punishment specifically, and Wright's later novel borrows quite liberally from Crime and Punishment for basic themes, situations, characters, and even approximations of dialogue. But more than merely a tribute to or a twentieth-century adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, The Outsider is a revision of and a challenge to Dostoevsky's thesis of the criminal haunted by conscience and guilt. For Cross Damon is what Wright calls "the ethical criminal" (466), a Raskolnikov in a world without God and hence without secure or shared values. Whereas Raskolnikov's project of self-will culminates in murder and the eventual recognition that his violation of the community must be confessed and atoned for, Cross's assertion of freedom takes place in the moral vacuum of a godless world, and he can find no evil in himself despite his chain of increasingly cold-blooded murders. Liberated to recreate both his identity and his values, Cross is also condemned to a life without hope of human connection or love.

On the subject of Wright's influences in The Outsider, Margaret Walker Alexander, like Fabre, minimizes the roles of Camus and Sartre, and she points out that, in Wright's view, Dostoevsky was the world's greatest novelist and The Brothers Karamazov his greatest novel (53). In an interview shortly before his death, Wright explicitly stated Dostoevsky's preeminence in affecting his world view: "Ahead of all the writers who molded my philosophy concerning modern man comes Dostoevsky" (8). With Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky posits modern man's loss of belief as the gravest danger both to the individual and the community, and The Outsider echoes the idea of atheism as the root cause of the decay of values and social order. In characters such as Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment; Stavrogin, Shatov, and Kirilov in The Devils; and Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky depicts the struggle of unbelief and the assertion of extreme self-will eventually eclipsed by the genesis of some sort of faith. Wright, on the other hand, does not suggest any possible regeneration for Cross, who remains stranded in his nihilistic revolt. Wright takes the position of the earnest, reluctant atheist, one who like Ivan does not so much celebrate freedom as insist that it be accepted and explored. Ivan reasons that "there is no virtue if there is no immortality" (60), deducing an agonized amorality much like that of Cross. When Ivan finds that he is morally responsible for his father's murder, he begins the painful reversal of his unbelief. When a train wreck allows Cross to stage his death and create a new identity, he finds nothing to restrain him from killing several people at will, until he wishes belatedly to love a woman and rejoin the community. He never sees the leap of faith as even a possibility because he discovers neither his responsibility for anything or anyone nor any limit to his right to self-will. The narrator's comment that "damned is the man who must invent his own god!" (483) summarizes Wright's theme that the absence of God opens up a chasm of despair. Cross's conclusion that therefore we" 'can do damn well what we please on this earth'" (483) becomes for Wright not a source of rejoicing but of troubled reflection and tragedy.

With remarkable liberality Wright models many aspects of his novel on Crime and Punishment, partially and presumably to indicate his debt to Dostoevsky and his philosophical agreement with him in some areas. Both Raskolnikov and Cross are university dropouts in their mid-twenties who are crushingly poor but who feel that their advanced intellect makes them superior to the masses of humanity. Both suffer from debilitating physical strains such as hunger, malnutrition, and fever, along with extreme nervous tension. Both have widowed, meddling mothers who have infused guilt and a neurotic self-image into their sons, and both rebel against this moralism with radical self-assertion. Wright employs two "Sonya" characters, the first being Jenny, the prostitute who offers to go away with Cross without knowing of his first murder. Just as Dostoevsky presents Sonya as Raskolnikov's means of salvation through confession and reparation, Wright uses Eva, the second figure, to elicit a similar, unrepentant confession. But Eva's subsequent suicide, based on her moral naivete, suggests that for Cross there can be no salvation. Wright also includes a character much like Svidrigailov in Hilton, whose function is similarly to threaten the protagonist with his knowledge of the murders and whose cold-blooded amoralism suggests the protagonist's duality and participation in evil. Cross seems momentarily to recognize Hilton's evil as part of himself, but he kills him in the attempt to deny it or to extract it from himself. Wright uses Hilton's agnostic and nihilistic lecture to Cross just as Dostoevsky uses Svidrigailov's comments to enlarge Raskolnikov's self-knowledge.

Further approximations of Dostoevsky's novel extend to situations, expressions of feeling, and even dialogue. For example, the description of Cross's "wave of self-loathing" (71) upon quitting the university correlates to Raskolnikov's feeling upon abandoning his studies. When Cross bolts up in bed and remembers the bloody handkerchief, one recalls Raskolnikov's identical action over his bloody trouser fringes and stolen items. The shame of crushed pride drives both young men quite close to suicide. The scene of Cross's confession to Eva recalls Raskolnikov's to Sonya, especially when Cross falls to his knees, "clutch[ing] his arms about her legs" (530). Perhaps the most explicit and extensive borrowing involves the character of Ely Houston, the district attorney who understands Cross's rebellious impulses and suspects him of murder. A direct but inert copy of Dostoevsky's examining magistrate Porfiry Petrovich, Houston bears some touches of his model's intellectual and psychological perspicacity, but his character remains rather flat, lacking Porfiry's irony and charm. Wright lifts intact the motif of the cat-and-mouse game between the investigator and the criminal, including Porfiry's winking and confidential banter. Just as Porfiry eventually drops all pretense and compassionately advises Raskolnikov to confess in order to avoid suicide, Houston finally speaks openly and points out the torment Cross will undergo in freedom if he does not confess.

In many instances, Wright utilizes dialogue which involves a virtually explicit restatement of Dostoevsky. For example, echoes of "The Grand Inquisitor" section of The Brothers Karamazov can be heard in Wright's emphasizing the cynicism of the communist leaders as well as the masses' weakness and longing for some figure to give them security in exchange for freedom. Cross attacks capitalism and communism for enslaving humanity, in a clear paraphrase of the Grand Inquisitor:

"Those few strong men who do not want to be duped, and who are stout enough in their hearts to accept a godless world, are quite willing, aye, anxious to let the masses of men rest comfortably in their warm cocoons of traditional illusions.... the slaves of today are those who are congenitally afraid of the new and the untried, who fall on their knees and break into a deep sweat when confronted with the horrible truth of the uncertain and enigmatic nature of life." (484-85)

And Wright uses Hilton's nihilistic lecture to Cross just as Dostoevsky employs Svidrigailov's comments to enlarge Raskolnikov's self-knowledge. Hilton sounds very much like Svidrigailov when the latter mocks idealism and discusses eternity as nothing but a room full of spiders:

"You're an inverted idealist. You're groping for some over-all concept to tie all life together. There is none, Lane.... Living in this world, Lane, is what we make it, and we make what there is of it. Beyond that there's nothing, nothing at all.... To think that there's something is foolish; to act as if there is something is mad." (401)

In imitation of the letter of Raskolnikov's mother, Cross's mother pressures him about his evident atheism and fears for his soul:" 'I need to know that you've found God, Cross.... For months now everything I've heard about you is bad'" (29). Wright also borrows directly from Crime and Punishment when Cross wonders to himself about Houston's deceptive strategies, experiences mounting frustration, and flirts with the idea of confessing:

Was Houston raising the question of the Negro to mislead him before he was told that he was under arrest? Why didn't he come right out with what he wanted? He had a foolish desire to reach forward and grab Houston's shoulder and say to him: All right; I know you're after me.... Let's get it over with. (163)

Houston frequently approximates the words of the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, as when he confides his understanding of the dark impulses of human nature and the criminal's need for punishment:

"My position's difficult... I feel outside the lives of men. Yet my job demands that I enforce the law against the outsider who breaks the law.... My greatest sympathy is for those who feel that they have a fight to break the law.... Most of them almost beg you to punish them. They would be lost without the law." (170-71)

Houston duplicates Porfiry's informal tone in seeking to convince the criminal of the investigator's sincerity and puzzlement as he asks, "'What kind of motive could such a killer have? That's what's puzzling me'" (374). The final interview between Cross and Houston, where the latter expresses compassionate, even brotherly concern for the murderer, is especially similar to that between Raskolnikov and Porfiry. Just as Porfiry drops all pretense of ambiguity and advises Raskolnikov to confess in order to avoid suicide, Houston points out the retributive torment Cross will undergo in freedom if he does not confess: "'... you made your own law.... And, by God, I, for one, am going to let you live by it.... You are going to punish yourself, see? You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge'" (571).

Wright evinces his inheritance from Dostoevsky in several key thematic concerns in The Outsider. The novel's resolution of the indeterminacy evident in Native Son on the issue of collectivism versus individual freedom owes much to Dostoevsky's own evolution from belief in radical political action and materialistic socialism to defense of the sacredness of personality. Native Son combines social protest and propagandistic defense of the Communist Party with implied criticism of its disinterest in the individual. In a manner similar to Dostoevsky in The Devils, Wright in The Outsider attacks the cynicism at the heart of supposedly humanistic organizations and movements. Dostoevsky exposes radical leaders such as Peter Verkhovensky as malicious, consciously despotic tyrants whose nominal commitment to freedom is hypocritical and overshadowed by their will to power. The analysis of collectivism in The Outsider proceeds along similar lines, focusing on its leaders' scorn for individual autonomy and its arrogation of godlike power over lives and deaths. With Cross's murders of Gil and Herndon, Wright symbolically executes these oppressors of humanity, whom he finds guilty of "'cheapening and devaluing our notions of human personality'" (490).

Wright's consistent rejection of deterministic naturalism, as expressed in the novella The Man Who Lived Underground (1944) and in The Outsider, can also be attributed partly to his intense admiration for Dostoevsky. In the early works Poor Folk and The Double, Dostoevsky vacillates between environment and personal responsibility as the primary cause of human suffering. However, virtually all his works after his Siberian imprisonment, and especially Notes from the House of the Dead, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, Notes from Underground, and Crime and Punishment, contribute to his critique of determinism as an affront to individual dignity. Although Wright's early works Lawd Today, Uncle Tom's Children, and Native Son stress the naturalistic idea of a harsh environment destroying human potential, they also mingle belief in individual action and an incipient existentialism, especially in the latter pages of Native Son, suggesting the inviolability of free will. Fred Daniels of The Man Who Lived Underground escapes from a murderous environment to a solitary underground world where he experiences nearly absolute existential freedom. (In Creative Revolt I discuss this most successful of Wright's fictions and the substantial influence of The Brothers Karamazov on it). Paradoxically, through Daniels's solipsistic revolt he discovers his social responsibility and an intimate connection with all people, in stark contrast to Cross's discovery of his "right" to do anything he pleases and of his utter aloneness. But both protagonists illustrate Wright's decisive affirmation of free will and his clear refutation of the claims of naturalism.

Among other aspects of Dostoevsky's legacy in The Outsider are several important insights. First, most of Wright's work, especially The Outsider, demonstrates Dostoevsky's influence in the idea that individuals have an irrepressible psychological and spiritual need for self-assertion, especially in oppressive circumstances - even if it results in the individual's harm or destruction. Both Bigger and Cross sense on some level that their revolts will end disastrously, but their need for asserting their dignity and expanding the possibilities of their identity overrules concern for others and fear for themselves. Second, Wright underscores Dostoevsky's theme, rendered most memorably in "The Grand Inquisitor," that many people lack the courage to assert or to accept their freedom, preferring the comfort of others' strict prescriptions of their behavior and thought. Ivan's Inquisitor, who rebukes Christ for giving man the alluring but insupportable burden of freedom, is echoed in The Outsider in Wright's treatment of Bob and Sara Hunter, whose escapes into collectivism and religion epitomize the waste of much human potential. Cross exercises his will to power as one of the few "masters" who do not fear becoming little gods. Third, Dostoevsky's insistence that the individual must set limits on self-assertion, or transcend it through loving others, is paralleled in the character of Ely Houston, himself a criminal at heart, who shares Cross's amoral impulses but realizes that" 'a lawless man has to rein himself in'" (378).

But much more than an exercise in admiration or emulation, The Outsider qualifies as a serious and accomplished philosophical novel in its own right. While Turner argues somewhat vaguely that The Outsider is "a revision and a redefinition of Native Son" (164), it is more clearly Wright's revision of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov and Cross undergo a similar "inward catastrophe from which new souls take their beginning" (Berdyaev, Idea 202). But the originality and force of Wright's approach lie in his reversal of Dostoevsky's thesis as he represents the murderer who never discovers any limit to his right to any action but who nonetheless becomes horrified not at his guilt but at his very innocence. In an interview in 1960 Wright expressed his fascination with and even admiration for Dostoevsky's protagonist, stating "Raskolnikov is one of my heroes" (8). Writing of Raskolnikov, Berdyaev summarizes the central question for him and for Cross Damon: "Are there norms and limits in my nature, or may I venture to do anything?" ("Dostoevsky" 574). While Raskolnikov resists his growing unconscious knowledge that these limits exist, Cross finds, in one sense to his profound disappointment, that they do not. Like Kirilov in The Devils, a work which Wright claimed "revealed new realms of feeling" for him (American Hunger 19) and which he studied very closely (Fabre, Quest 175), Cross is a pioneer in this relatively new metaphysical world, which can acquire meaning only through the enthronement of individual will. But Kirilov's suicide, an act which is supposed to prove his perfect freedom and godhood, is interrupted by his mystical awakening, whereas Cross experiences no such epiphany. Cross is also related to Stavrogin, who with conscious amorality determines to commit hideous acts in order to test whether he can be revulsed by extremes of "evil" behavior. But whereas Stavrogin recovers his sense of good and evil just before his suicide, an act of self-punishment, Cross remains adamantly innocent, and consequently despairing.

In a sense, Cross succeeds in exactly the materialistic task Raskolnikov sets for himself, but fails - namely, to prove that, for the extraordinary individual, there is neither good nor evil, and therefore no guilt. Cross finds, as Raskolnikov does not, that he is such a one, like the elite few of the Grand inquisitor's hierarchy and like the godlike enslavers of humanity whom he despises so much who dominate communism and fascism. Yet in another sense, this success is Cross's failure, for despite his gains in freedom and power, he hates his new identity as a corrupt little god, and he loses his chance at new life with Eva. Dostoevsky depicts a metaphysical or spiritual individualism which must either find a transcendent value or destroy itself. In contrast, Wright portrays a materialistic individualism whose both license and duty is to transcend all accepted values and which must rely solely on its own variable strength for survival. In his notebooks for Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky views crime paradoxically as a potential source of the individual's "moral development," for crime raises "the possibility of such questions as earlier were impossible" (473). He demonstrates with Raskolnikov and others that "out of despair comes a new perspective" (472). Wright offers evidence of considerable development in Cross's sense of self and freedom, but he carefully withholds any hint of what might be called "moral growth"; in fact, he emphasizes Cross's deepening despair, the condition Kierkegaard (whose definition of dread opens Book One of the novel) refers to as "the sickness unto death."

Cross traverses metaphysical territory explored by Dostoevsky's protagonists, but, unlike them, he does not return from the region beyond values. Wright depicts Bigger and Cross as tragic heroes, victims of their own evolving strength, admirable for their assertions of self and dignity. Unlike Dostoevsky's protagonists and Wright's Fred Daniels, they remain proudly yet tragically their own gods, achieving what Widmer calls an "heroic nothingness" (180). Dostoevsky's idea of the possibilities for moral development inherent in evil acts is adapted in a limited sense by Wright in the noble acceptance of an oppressive freedom by Bigger and Cross. But Cross's unyielding conviction of his innocence denies him the regeneration which Dostoevsky portrays as proceeding only from the recognition of evil.

Evident throughout Wright's work is his rejection of and hostility toward Christianity, which is another salient aspect of his dissent from Dostoevsky and which informs the tortured atheism of The Outsider. Wright views believers condescendingly as the weak, deluded masses of "The Grand Inquisitor," who crave submission to authority and who dread free choice. When Sarah Hunter surrenders her pain and autonomy to the church, Cross mocks her with biblical quotes and a paraphrase of the devil's words to Ivan Karamazov:" 'Perhaps God uses the Devil to guide people home'" (553). Wright presents Cross somewhat contradictorily, first as the heroic "pre-Christian man," guided by" 'nothing at all but his own desires'" (426) and placed in the modern world supposedly without the vices and neuroses inflicted by centuries of Christianity. Yet he also presents him as the victim of those ills, passed along to him by the repressive, judgmental theology of his mother, whose joyless, repressive religiosity fosters and virtually requires such fearful rebellion.

Wright skillfully if not always successfully maintains his reluctant thesis of Cross's innocence. When at the conclusion of the novel Cross is gunned down by the communists, he confides to Houston his thoughts and feelings about his quest for freedom, locating his horror not in any sense of compunction but in his blamelessness: "'It ... It was ... horrible.... I'm innocent.... That's what made the horror'" (586). In contrast to Raskolnikov, whose physical decline and mental torture signify that he is not an extraordinary person, Cross grows stronger in his resolve and his rejection of guilt over the course of his four murders. He dares to claim a "deeply forbidden" (109) innocence, as the narrator implies his heroism for breaking the bonds of everyday morality: "Cross had to discover what was good or evil through his own actions, which were more exacting than the edicts of any God because it was he alone who had to bear the brunt of their consequences with a sense of absoluteness made intolerable by knowing that this life of his was all he had and would ever have" (157). Wright attempts to deflect possible antipathy toward Cross the murderer by minimizing his responsibility and by rendering most of his victims as cruel agents of despotism. He sustains the tone of Cross's qualified innocence through the murder of his friend Joe, drawn as self-protection, and the murders of Gil, Herndon, and Hilton, which are seen as symbolic executions of the evils of collectivism. Although Cross literally "sees no evil" in his actions, like Raskolnikov he comes to expect and need at least external limitations through the recognition and punishment of law.

The innocent transgressor experiences a surprising terror when Houston admits he has no proof against Cross and abandons him to his freedom:

The prop had gone; Houston had gone; the world against which he had pitched his rebellion had pitied him, almost forgiven him.... He was not to be punished! Men would not give meaning to what he had done! Society would not even look at it, recognize it! That was not fair, wasn't right, just. (573)

Cross's death is both retribution, required for the antipathy his actions evoke, and, contrarily, euthanasia, Wright's decision to spare his character protracted, apparently meaningless suffering while also reinforcing Cross's depiction as innocent victim.

The most significant ideological problem with The Outsider stems from its conflicted defense of individual freedom and dignity, which Wright uses to refute collectivism and naturalism. Wright's tone of qualified acceptance of Cross's violence (if only on a symbolic level) and ultimate violation of others' rights seriously compromises the force of his argument. Although Wright does not condone the murders, and although he points to the disastrous consequences of absolute self-will, his ambivalence accounts for the narrator's sympathy for the nihilistic adventure of Cross Damon. This attitude is reflected most clearly in the reference to Cross's situation as "the dilemma of the ethical criminal" (466). But although a less euphemistic phrasing might be "the ethical murderer," Wright clearly contends that Cross has gone beyond both morality and ethics. Nagueyalti Warren notes that Cross "loves none of the Black women in his life" (69), and she connects this failure to "a general indictment of women" (72) in Wright's works. While her latter assertion is convincing, the former gives Cross too much credit for his relationship with the white Eva. Cross cannot truly love anyone because, as Widmer suggests, his self-hatred "results in ultimate revenge against the self" (173) as well as against others.

As Zola claims to experiment with naturalism in the laboratory of his novel, so with The Outsider Wright continues the experiment begun in The Man Who Lived Underground with naturalism's antithesis, existential freedom. In spite of Wright's articulate investigation of man's plight of freedom, there continues much critical confusion as to his philosophical belief. Several critics argue against the novel as existential, maintaining it has "a naturalistic context" (Margolies 137), offers "proof not of Wright's existentialism but his rejection of existentialism" (Brignano 163), and embodies his "existential anti-existentialism" (Widmer 180). Some of this misunderstanding may be based on disapproval of existentialism or ignorance of its roots, as suggested in Ford's statement that existentialism entails the denial of the existence of God (144), a blatant error that disregards two of the most influential early existentialists, the centrally theistic Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Harold McCarthy also obscures Wright's novel with the amazing implication that it is (perhaps like Native Son) a protest novel, beating "at its deepest level the hallmarks of Wright's compulsion to shape society in accordance with some ideal conception of social justice" (77). In fact, in writing the first book of The Outsider Wright did borrow extensively from the then-unpublished, heavily naturalistic Lawd Today (Fabre 163). Thus the world from which Cross escapes after the train wreck is drawn as a harsh, smothering, naturalistic environment. But Wright incorporates these naturalistic motifs partly in order to signify all the more decisively his departure from naturalism with the ultimate freedom which Cross attains; the tragic result of that freedom in no way diminishes Wright's axiom that freedom is man's natural if dangerous element. A weakness in the novel inheres in Wright's confusing reintroduction of naturalistic implications late in the story, in the not altogether sincere attempt to diffuse antipathy for Cross's free actions by minimizing his responsibility. This attempt again demonstrates Wright's strong attachment to his hero, and it should not be mistaken for a reversal of his existential thesis.

Late in his life Wright confided, in words reminiscent of Cross Damon, his deep personal sense of spiritual isolation and aloneness:

I am a rootless man but neither psychologically distraught nor in any way particularly perturbed because of it.... I like and even cherish the taste of abandonment, of aloneness; it does not bother me, indeed, it seems to be the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it. (White Man, Listen 17)

Fabre points out that Wright's definition of man in The Outsider as "nothing in particular" and his conversion of Sartre's "hell is others" to "hell is the self" (World 163, 172) suggest a world view far more nihilistic than that of the French existentialists, who sought "societal survival through the restoration of human values and morality" (173). The quality and sophistication of the novel aside, with The Outsider Wright's vision in one sense darkens considerably, regressing from Fred Daniels's testimony of human interconnection and responsibility in The Man Who Lived Underground. In another sense Wright is examining another possible avenue of Daniels's development in Cross's rejection of the community and his suicidal self-assertion. Ironically, while Daniels's discovery of universal responsibility fills him with joy, Cross's discovery of individual innocence provides him with his only experience of horror. The idea of the interrelation of humanity and the corporate experience of salvation was deeply ingrained in Dostoevsky and in nineteenth-century Russian thought generally, as exemplified in Vladimir Solovyov's statement that "it is only together with all other human beings that the individual can really be saved" (96). After Cross has been shot, he tells Houston of his regret that he has not found" 'some way to give the meaning of my life to others.... To make a bridge, from man to man' "(585). But this weak echo of Daniels's ecstatic and fully motivated vision (itself strongly influenced by Dmitry Karamazov's spiritual resurrection) belies Cross's proud isolation and his final claims of blamelessness.

Yet in spite of the materialism of The Outsider, Wright strains to posit a definition of man that can incorporate a spiritual element. By depicting Cross's increasing suffering and his need for punishment, which suggest the yearning for atonement and redemption of some sort, Wright approaches Dostoevsky's thesis on Raskolnikov's spiritual nature: "He had learned that it is easy to kill a man but that spiritual and not physical energy is expended in the doing of it" (Berdyaev, "Dostoevsky" 574-75).

Whether The Outsider is a "greater" or more expertly realized novel than Native Son may be a debatable issue, but The Outsider is surely an underrated work. More consistent ideologically and better structured than Wright's classic, it includes a more complex treatment of the themes of freedom and identity. It also surmounts the charge against Native Son, best expressed in Baldwin's famous essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," that the protest novel denies the power and dread of the human being (17). Yet Wright paid a significant price for locating his second published novel beyond considerations of politics and polemics.

This paper has attempted to clarify some of the misconceptions regarding The Outsider which (as noted above) Joyce Ann Joyce astutely claims have haunted Wright's novels. Wright incorporates elements of Crime and Punishment into his novel primarily to highlight his debate with Dostoevsky and to suggest the lamentable innocence of the individual who asserts total self-will in a godless world. Margolies holds that with The outsider Wright "is saying that freedom is an impossibility" (137). Actually Wright is saying not only that freedom is a definite possibility, but that in spite of its burden and awful potential risk it is perhaps the individual's most profound duty to him- or herself. The possibilities for its abuse are summarized in Dmitry Karamazov's agonized question of how man is going to be good without God. In the character of Cross Damon, Wright indicates that there may be no answer outside the limitations imposed by the self.

Works Cited

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Bakish, David. Richard Wright. New York: Ungar, 1973.

Baldwin, James. "Everybody's Protest Novel." Notes of a Native Son. New York: Bantam, 1955.9-17.

Berdyaev, Nikolai. "Dostoevsky, the Nature of Man, and Evil." Dostcevsky, Crime 571-77.

-----. The Russian Idea. New York: Macmillan, 1948.

Brignano, Russell C. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1970.

Dickstein, Morris. "Wright, Baldwin, Cleaver." Ray and Farnsworth 183-90.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Ed. Ralph Matlaw. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Norton, 1976.

-----. Crime and Punishment. Ed. George Giblan. Trans. Jesse Coulson. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1975.

-----. "Dostoevsky's Notebooks." Dostoevsky, Crime 470-76.

Fabre, Michel. Introduction. Richard Wright Reader. Ed. Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper, 1978. vii-xxiv.

-----. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. New York: Morrow, 1973.

-----. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1985.

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Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.

Lynch, Michael F. Creative Revolt: A Study of Wright, Ellison, and Dostoevsky. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.

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Margolies, Edward, The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1969.

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Nisula, Dasha Culic. "Dostoevsky and Richard Wright: From St. Petersburg to Chicago." Dostoevsky and the Human Condition After a Century. Ed. Alexei Ugrinsky, Frank Lambasa, and Valija Ozolin. New York: Greenwood, 1986. 163-70.

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Turner, Darwin T. "The Outsider. Revision of an Idea." Macksey and Moorer 163-75.

Warren, Nagueyalti. "Black Girls and Native Sons: Female Images in Selected Works by Richard Wright." Trotman 59-77.

Widmer, Kingsley. "Black Existentialism: Richard Wright." Macksey and Moorer 173-81.

Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper, 1977.

-----. Interview. L'Express (Paris) 8 Nov. 1960: 7-14.

-----. The Outsider. 1953. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

-----. White Man, Listen. New York: Doubleday, 1957.

Michael F. Lynch is Associate Professor of English at the Trumbull campus of Kent State University and the author of Creative Revolt: A Study of Wright, Ellison, and Dostoevsky (Peter Lang, 1990). In the summer of 1993, he was a resident fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville, and he is currently working on a book-length study of James Baldwin.