Manhood and Violence
In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Richard Wright explores the complicated, conflicting nature of masculinity through the eyes of Dave Saunders, a seventeen-year-old Black farm worker in the 1930s American South who believes that he can assert his masculinity by purchasing a gun. Wright has sympathy for Dave, telling much of the story in Dave’s voice and chronicling the various ways Dave is abused or humiliated, particularly by his father and the older…
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Racism and Power
White characters don’t appear often or for extended periods in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” but it’s impossible to understand the anxiety Dave Saunders experiences throughout the story without considering racism. The story is set in the American South around the 1930s, nearly forty years after the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves. Yet by explicitly setting the story on a “plantation” in the South, and showing how…
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Economic Oppression
The Saunders family is poor—Dave’s mother is worried about saving enough money for winter clothes and shows extreme frugality by asking to use the catalog that Dave borrows from the local store as toilet paper in the outhouse. While Mr. Hawkins, the owner of the plantation where the Saunders family works, is not depicted as a violent or openly cruel man, in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Wright details the insidious…
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