Wounded as he was by southern birth and upbringing, Richard Wright fought back blindly with the nearest weapon at hand—in his case, anger. Anger mounting to rage rushes across the pages of his work; too often it overflows and drowns it before it can take shape. And it is the terrible anger of a man who accepts and can see no way out, for his rage is thrust in against himself. That is the greatest irony of all, that a man should be guilty in America by reason of his difference from the majority and acquiesce in his guilt. But Wright is involved in guilt, not irony.

There is a further irony in the fact that the shaping tools he used for his work were first Communism and later, after his self-exile in France, existentialism. Both philosophies had the ultimate effect of weakening his work. (p. 110)

The irony of this lies precisely in the fact that the Negro is an existentialist, living as it were in a perpetual limbo. The Negro is forever outside seeking entry, the intellectual existentialist is inside looking for an exit. Wright, an emotional writer, could paint a stunning picture of the Negro's plight but when he attempted to intellectualize it he embraced it from the wrong angle, from the inside out rather than in terms of his own characters….

While Communism failed him and existentialism provided only a weak adjunct to his writings, he was sustained by an overwhelming sense of guilt, an earlier age would have called it sin. It became increasingly clear to him as he wrote and as we read his work that lying at the bottom of every Negro soul is crushing guilt. For him Negro life took on the proportions of expiation for crimes committed, known and unknown. (p. 111)

Guilt and fear like some crazy quilt pattern themselves through his work. In the story "The Man Who Lived Underground" … an innocent Negro escapes from the law into the sewers. Fear motivates his flight underground, fear that he may be found guilty of an unknown crime. His miniature odyssey assumes symbolic as well as literal proportions as he views the world from his shelter of invisibility and acquires an anonymous identity paralleling that of Negroes above ground. From his underground vantage point he is able to participate anonymously in a series of social and unsocial acts peculiar to our society. Gradually he moves from fear to self-accusation ending in surrender to the police and death. But even at his death we are no closer to knowing the sort of man he really was. Whether he had family, friends, sweetheart, convictions to sustain him, how he lived till then we have no clue. The protagonist is merely presented as an instrument for the author's ideas moving from a lesser to a greater madness. One does not feel the sharp intelligence, the planned anarchy of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a theme of similar dimensions. Ellison's man goes from naivete to wide-eyed awareness and ends as a sniper against the society that made him. He adopts consciously the fate thrust upon him and lives by outsmarting the forces that would keep him down. Wright's man, on the other hand, performs the deeds of theft and murder as a child rebelling against an overstern parent, only to return "home" at the end for the punishment he feels he merits. This inverse paternalism constitutes a major weakness of Wright's as an artist, but at the time of his earlier work it undoubtedly helped his popularity. Today Americans are more sophisticated and more likely to approve Ellison's action as he strips society's pretentions bare, laughs at it and himself, and mocks its attempts to destroy him. Wright was never far enough removed to do more than suffer and articulate that suffering incompletely—for without objectivity it must be incomplete—but powerfully enough to touch us. And he is merciless in the presentation of that suffering. Never will all the platitudes uttered about the Negro had one imagined it to be quite like this. It fascinated, it horrified, it aroused, it even repelled, but its force was undeniable. It has the hypnotic force of the most brutal of nightmares from which we cannot wake voluntarily. On waking finally while we lie there sweating and telling ourselves it is only a dream, our heart beats madly as we keep remembering. He articulated as no other an American nightmare. That he could not waken out of it himself is our loss. (pp. 111-12)