Richard suffers quite a bit in this book. He talks of how he never feels full after each meal and how he wishes that he could eat as much meat and other things as he wanted. This physical hunger drives him to get a job working for white people in their home to help support himself and his family. This hunger has a positive effect on him because it pushes him to better himself and to help his family in their time of need.
Richard also suffers from hunger of wanting to break away from his family and from religion. He hungers to be independent and to not have to deal with his family that is anything but understanding. His family continues to push him in the direction of God; a direction that he does not want to take. They continue to urge him to go to God, go with them to church, become a real Christian. The more that they push him to do these things the more he hungers to break away. He also is beaten by his family, which he hates because he views himself to be somewhat of an adult, and that other adults don't have a right to beat him if he's unable to fight back. He hungers to grow up and move away. All of these things hungers are negative. They teach Richard to be on the defensive and to not love his family unconditionally like families should. It also is causing him to rebel against adults, authority figures as well as religion as a whole. He probably wouldn't have these feelings about religion if his family wasn't trying so hard to get him to come into the arms of God.
Finally Richard hungers for social interaction. Whenever he is with people that he enjoys he commits himself to being somewhat reserved so that people don't ask him about his home life or to come over to visit him. He feels ashamed of his home life, which causes him to be socially deprived. He talks about how he does things not because he wants to or because he thinks it's the right thing to do, but because he likes the people that are asking him to do it. This hunger could be viewed as positive or negative. It's positive in the way that Richard wants to make friends and to talk to people, but it is also negative because he's doing things for the wrong reasons in order to please his friends.
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4 comments:
Nice title.
Very nice ideas. I really like the sentence fluency of this analysis. The ideas are well supported by what you say and only lack page numbers. Nice analysis
Kelly, really great ideas! I agree when you say Richard hungers to independent, he shows this when he his family pushes him to be christian, like you said. Are these hungers negative or positive? I think his hunger for social interaction is positive because it shows that he really yearns to be more accepted even though he maybe doing the wrong things. You're voice really shows through and that makes your writing much better.
I hadn't thought of his hunger for independence. Indeed, this hunger pretty much drived him forward in every aspect of his life. Very deep...
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