In Richard Wright's autobiographical novel Black Boy, the narrator often speaks of his severe 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 suffers from later in life overrides these primitive impulses. Throughout his story, Richard expresses his struggles with physical, mental, and social hunger, the different reactions each evokes in him, and how he combats them. Satisfying his physical malnutrition is what keeps him alive, but his efforts to cure his mental hunger are what makes the reader feel Richard's passion. This dichotomy exists throughout the novel, but Richard reacts to these desires in different ways, and his different responses to physical versus mental hunger show his growth over the course of the novel. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The first part of Black Boy follows Richard from his early childhood to his young adulthood. It traces his family's personal and financial ups and downs and follows his path to work, learning and social understanding. At the beginning of the book, Richard is still a child and acts mainly to satisfy his primitive needs, mainly physical satiety. There are many instances where Richard has to struggle, both mentally and physically, to get food and not stay hungry. In one of the first scenes of the novel, Nathan, Richard's father, leaves the family for another woman. His mother, Ella, blames his departure on the family's sudden lack of food. She says that since he was the breadwinner, their options for supporting themselves are now limited. “'Your father is not here now,' [Ella] said. 'Where is it?' "I don't know," he said. “But I'm hungry,” I whined, stomping my foot. “You will have to wait until I get a job and buy food,” he 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 a deep biological bitterness” (16). Richard's father abandons his family, and they are forced to fight his absence to avoid starving. This causes Richard to develop an unpleasant association between his father and hunger. In this case, he has an emotional struggle with physical hunger confronting him; she resents her father's selfishness and very quickly devalues ​​her relationship with him. This mental conflict with his father and his quest to satisfy his hunger set the tone for his battle with food for most of his young life. With this initial bad experience already in his memory, Richard's instinct to desperately forage for food whenever possible increases dramatically, along with his readiness to react. This conflict continues when Ella then sends Richard out shopping, the group of boys attacks him. He sends him back and the boys rob him again, so he finally arms him with a stick to fight them off and tells him he will whip him if he comes back empty-handed. “I was shocked. My mother told me to argue, something she had never done before… 'Don't come into this house until you've done the shopping,' she said” (17). His mother's confidence in encouraging him to fight shows him how dire and desperate his need for food was. He manages to hurt the other boys, thus demonstrating his willingness to physically fight for food. Richard suffers their abuse to avoid going hungry and accepts the threats of the boys' parents, but fights despite everything. This episode pushes Richard's guard to be up and ready and subliminally trains his instinct to get food every time, orhowever, possible, no matter how drastic the measures. This instinct is shown 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 sense of certainty, Richard still has the urge to steal food for later. He takes measures to hide food for those who will starve in the future, to relieve his conditioned fear. During his struggle with hunger, he told himself that he would be happy with even the smallest amount of food. However, when the opportunity to eat arose, he was so used to starving himself and doing whatever it took to fill himself later that he hid the food anyway, even if it wasn't entirely necessary at the time. He was so used to having to be deceitful and deceitful to survive that he automatically assumed that role even in less dire circumstances. Richard demonstrates a new degree of desperation when he decides to sell his poodle, Betsy, for a dollar to buy food. Betsy was a gift to him from Professor Matthews and when his potential client, a white woman, is unable to pay the full dollar she is asking for, he takes Betsy home. “I grabbed Betsy and ran home, happy I hadn't sold her. But my hunger returned. Maybe I should have gotten the ninety-seven cents? But by then it was too late” (70). He struggled with the dilemma of whether to sell Betsy for the partial ninety-seven cents or keep her, and doubted himself after making his choice. Soon a car hit Betsy and Richard was torn between grief and anger. Although he loved the dog and was sad to see it die, he was also angry that he couldn't sell it. Richard suffers these harsh emotional consequences and hates his hunger for causing him to lose his dog. In his starving situation, a live dog meant a chance at money, and a dead dog was useless. This callousness affecting Richard frustrates him, because he wants to be emotionally sentient, but still feels that practicality is more important. These priorities are soon reversed, and Richard's actions change accordingly. This shift in priorities shifts Richard's focus from satisfying his physical needs to satisfying his social desires. He takes steps to resolve his physical hunger out of desperation, but attempts to resolve his mental hunger out of passion. His hunger for social relevance drives him to continue to step outside of the black social comfort zone – only doing things that are “socially acceptable” for African Americans – instead of locking him into a protective stupor as his lack of food has done. After maturation, Richard begins to sacrifice physical satiety to satisfy his mental, intellectual, and social hunger. Richard engages in a newfound passion for knowledge, which encourages his willingness to sacrifice his most primitive needs. When Richard's mother puts an end to his six-year alcoholism, he begins to experience a new hunger for intellect. He teaches himself to read by flipping through children's books and learns to count when a delivery boy teaches him, but instead of satisfying him, these skills merely serve as a taste that increases his appetite for more knowledge and answers. Richard finds Ella, the teacher who rented a room from Granny, reading Bluebeard and His Seven Wives, and is very intrigued as she tells him about the novel. The grandmother, however, forbids this "devil's work" (39) in her house, because she thinks that fiction is as morally bad as lying and sinning. Despite his grandmother, Richard secretly becomes determined to read as many novels as possible. “Not knowing the end of the story filled me with a sense of emptiness, of loss. I craved the sharp, frightening excitement,breathtaking, almost painful that the story had given me, and I swore that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and I would read them to satisfy that thirst for violence that was in me, for intrigue, for plots, for secrecy, for bloody murders” (40). Reading gave him an escape into this world that seemed far more fantastic than his own, and he was willing to fight to maintain that mystery. Even though her grandmother is physically abusive towards her and threatens to refuse meals, she secretly borrows Ella's books and tries to read them. Despite the prospect of going hungry, he greatly values ​​the experience of reading and learning and believes that devouring an intellectual feast is more important than gratifying his physical hunger. When Richard's mother becomes too ill to work, the neighbors offer Richard 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 strangers" (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 takes into account the method of acquisition and its integrity. He sacrifices the ability to be fed to maintain his pride. He realizes that if he wants people to accept him socially as more than just a freeloading black kid, he has to prove to himself that he's better than that. This mature step to better himself socially shows that Richard is indeed changing, especially since the opportunity would not have cost him any physical or financial expense. 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 works for sells Ku Klux Klan propaganda prints. As much as he appreciates having an income to support his life with his peers, his social awareness takes over and he chooses to value easing the pain of his conscience caused by racism over his pains of physical hunger. When he was younger, he probably would have looked past this degrading factor of work and continued working to fund his grocery bill. When working in the white family's house, the woman of the family mocks Richard when he says he aspires to be a writer, and he immediately quits. “As I walked around his house towards the street, I knew I wasn't going back. The woman had attacked my ego; he had taken for granted that he knew my place in life, what I felt, what I should be, and I resented it with all my heart” (147). Regardless of his awareness of the likelihood that he will not become a writer, Richard does not appreciate being told this openly by his racist employer. He longs for acceptance of his dreams and not ridicule from his class, and sacrifices the compensation he receives from his job. Even though the job paid for his food, he chose to value his social desires and his dignity over his salary. At the beginning of the novel, he probably would have bitten his lip and ignored her comments, but now that he valued his dignity more than his health, Richard came to realize that his teasing wasn't worth the small salary he was earning . he believes the gain is worth the cost for his next job, due to his motivation in satisfying his emotional hunger to fit into a society that accepts him. He works for an equally unpleasant family who greatly compounds the emotional stress by being extremely rude and ungrateful, but finds it worth it when it allows him to become an active member of his peer population. Since he now has enough money to stay.