Art of Reading - Black Boy - Reading Response

1) Reveled "I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience."
Revel means to take intense pleasure or satisfaction. Revel, in this quote, is significant because of the contrast it creates when compared to the last clause of the sentence.

Endowed "As her words fell upon my new ears, I endowed them with a reality that welled up from somewhere within me."
Endowed, in this case, means provided with something freely or naturally.

2) What helped me enjoy this novel most, but not necessarily understand the full context, was reading the novel as a new journalism bildungsroman. This brought more questions than it answered about the classification of the novel, but at the same time I was able to think more deeply about what defines reliable first-person narration. I am still sculpting what is and is not necessary for a narrator to be reliable, and am discovering that strict objectivity is not what makes for a reliable narrator so much as honest emotional and intellectual responses.

3) Black Boy is a bildungsroman, a novel which focuses on the development of a character from childhood through adolescence to adulthood, whose main character is the author: Richard Wright. Wright uses his own autobiography in this new-journalism novel to bring awareness to the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth Century America. This novel is about growing out of racism in a time when race roles were virtually unbreakable.

Works Cited
Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York, New York: Perenial Classics, 1998