But his mistress commits suicide when she sees him as he is. There follows a chapter in which the Law, personified by a hunchbacked district attorney who understands Cross Damon, convicts him of a crime and condemns him, but is powerless to give his life significance by punishment. After this Cross is murdered. The district attorney comes to his death bed and asks how was life and Cross dies murmuring, 'It was horrible.
The Outsider was Wright's first book to receive predominantly negative reviews. Black reviewers believed that Wright's interest in existentialism indicated a separation from his roots. Most [ who? The novel has often been considered the result of Wright's involvement with existential thinkers following his break from Marxism in the s. In Native Son , central character Bigger expresses in a less articulate manner the same sort of rage and dread felt by Damon.
In Art and Fiction , Wright maintained that personal freedom was conditioned on the freedom of others. Thus, in The Outsider Wright addressed familiar themes but consciously tried to move beyond the racial limitations of his earlier work. Wright, influenced primarily by German nihilism and his earlier involvement in the Communist party, condemns Marxism for its repression of individuality inherent in the structure of such group ideologies. Damon, molded by his repressive childhood as an African American child with a Christian mother, spends much of the novel escaping or preventing coercion against him by others.
He shivers and pushes the baby away so that the water can carry it onward. Then, he sleeps. Cold and hungry, he digs and pokes at a brick wall until he sees an undertaker preparing a corpse for burial. A dead white man lies on a white table, with a black coffin next to him. Before leaving the funeral home, Fred happens upon a toolbox. He takes a hammer, nails, a crowbar, a light bulb, and electrical wiring.
Fred then sneaks into a movie theater, where he collects sandwiches from an elderly coal-bin worker and finds more tools. An usher mistakes Fred for one of them and points him to the washroom. Returning to the sewer, Fred finds a nice cave to dwell in. He saves the baby at first but not the woman before the baby disappears and he feels that he himself is drowning.
Upon waking up, he starts digging again until he hears a typing sound above him. Using a screwdriver, he opens a crack in the office and sees a white hand putting money into a safe. He decides he can watch for the combination of the safe and give himself a purpose to stay underground. Next, Fred wanders into a radio shop. He steals a radio and takes it back to his cave, intending to hook it up and listen to music. However, all he hears on the radio are depressing news stories about war, destruction, crime, and hatred.
Fred associates all these things with the aboveground world, which reinforces his decision to stay below and live unfettered. Fred feels more at peace with his conscience.
Shortly after hearing the radio news of World War II battles, Fred has a dream in which he witnesses his own dead body. He scrapes his way into the building next to the office with the safe and finds himself in a butcher shop, where the smell of fresh meat disgusts him. He waits for the butcher to leave and then grabs his cleaver and takes several pieces of fruit.
Panicked, he agrees to do the transaction, being overly polite to them. When they leave, he walks out of the store. Feeling naked and condemned and being unable to prove his innocence especially since he signed a confession, he goes back in the store, grabs the cleaver, and retreats underground.
He starts to remove bricks from the basement of the building with the safe in it. After making a hole big enough to squeeze through, he enters a stairwell leading to a door. Upon opening it, he sees a white girl standing in front of a steel cabinet. She screams at him, and he races back down to his hole. However, he then decides to go up and make sure that room is the one with the safe in it.
Through the cracks, he sees the safe behind the girl. He decides to wait there and watch for someone to turn the code on the safe. Eventually, Fred witnesses a thief unlocking the safe and stealing money. Fred has no desire to spend the money; he merely wants to possess it for the sport of stealing it. Malcolm Wright is a filmmaker and conservationist. Download the textual notes PDF, KB This special publication features full-cloth binding, acid-free paper, and a unique design with specifications differing from those of Library of America series titles.
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