Rite Of Passage In Richard Wright's The Man Who Was Almost A Man

Wright’s Rite of Passage

In Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Was Almost A Man” the ideas of a young African American man’s coming of age is explored in the early twentieth century. In this short story our protagonist Dave struggles with the true definition of manhood and the rite of passage in rural southern America. He acts in ways that “ suggested a challenge to ideas of manhood”(Fine) by others in the community that he misguidedly finds fitting.

This short story is loosely a take on traditional rites of passages from european or Native cultures, in the sense that the young man must exert a fatal act on another being or animal as a part of the initiation into manhood. “For a people living in a new unsettled land, variations on the archetype of the young hero who achieves manhood by hunting and slaying a wild beast came early and naturally as a literary theme.”(Loftis 437) Dave is the

Dave still continues to behave as a child throughout the short story. “Dave’s attempt to get money from his mother to buy the gun reveal that he in fact is still a child; he whines wheedles and beg, and his mother responds as if he were a child.’(Loftis 439) When presenting the idea of owning a gun to the man who owns it Dave was given a response such as this: “You ain’t nothing but a boy. You don’t need a gun.”(Wright 900) Members of the community do not find Dave mature enough to own a weapon such as this. He has not exerted any actions or characteristics that members of the community find fitting for a man. Dave has only seemed ,as seen in the text, to exert behavior of a child. In both scenarios of Dave obtaining the gun and killing the Jenny with the gun; Dave wanted to hide his actions and lie about what he has done. When presented with opportunities to act as adult and prove maturity Dave goes astray and acts as if he were a child instead of the young man he would like to be seen