The workings of a child's mind are often confused in retrospect. The combination of his awakening senses, his parents' authority, and the world of his contemporaries makes it nearly impossible to discover the individual in the child. Wright's objective voice helps to clarify these confusing elements to himself and to the reader. Conscious of Freud's observations about human behavior and steeped in the writers of his time including James Joyce Richard Wright is, in a sense, analyzing himself as he writes the book. This self-analysis persists chapter by chapter, and very soon the individual boy begins to emerge as more than a so-called rebel without a cause. He begins to understand what has been troubling him and why, and this leads him to make distinctions between just and unjust rage.
As with most people, the first and most fundamental test of who he is as an individual comes among his contemporaries. There he develops a personality, unique and separate, as a member of a larger social order. First we see Richard among his friends where he plays out traditional boyhood roles, ranging from joker to tough guy. Yet in this section, Wright is not simply reproducing the standard games children play. He is showing how a particular culture is preserved and how a tradition is maintained by the offspring. The boys' attitudes toward themselves and toward white people are the attitudes they have been given by their parents. Richard is no misfit among them. They are all young and curious and full of their masculinity. An awareness of the white world, however, hangs ominously over all their words, and soon enough they are prisoners of their society, engaged in warfare with white boys. It is a one-way street. Before these boys have time to let their imaginations plan what they will do as men, they are trapped in a historical role. This is what lack of opportunity means. Blacks cannot hope like whites can. Blacks exist only in order to set themselves up against white people. Their value as a people is determined by whites. For a time, it looks as if Richard will fit right into this pattern. All the factors in his life have been arranged so that he will.
