Richard Wright operates haunting imagery, vehement symbolism, figurative language, and tranquil diction to denote the narrator's sadness for the victim and the malice towards the perpetrators of the crime and his relization that racism is always prevalent in American society. Throughout his poem "Between the World and Me" author Richard Wright uses a variety of images to accurately portray his well of emotions and attitudes toward the sobering scene he has found. By combining the switch of melancholic to shocked to nostalgic to gruesome and violent imagery with a shifting point of view Wright is able to create a vivid, surreal portrayal of emotion. The speaker stumbles the remains of a scene of horrific violence, the evidence that remains
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Wright’s articulates the African American struggle to attain self-conscious personhood while traversing a landscape littered with the remnants of chattel slavery and darkened by the shadow of prejudice and injustice echoes deeply in the natural imagery of “Between the World and Me.” While pondering the skull and the remnants of that tragic night, the speaker is transported back to that awful moment. Though the speaker comes upon the site in the morning, just as "the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of a stony skull", he feels the ground grip his feet and his heart being "circled by icy walls of fear-". Wright climatically juxtaposes images of violence, religion, and childhood innocence, are brilliantly contrasted by the understated ending in which speaker and skeleton quietly become one. In his dark reverie he imaginatively becomes the unfortunate victim: shivering in the cold of the night wind, hearing the yelps of the pursuing hounds, surrounded by the crowd of cruel faces, bloodied and tortured by callous and inhumane hands. The ignominies he vicariously suffers-beating, sexual humiliation, tarring-and-feathering, and incineration-drive home the horrors of the actual African-American experience in a shockingly immediate
Wright’s articulates the African American struggle to attain self-conscious personhood while traversing a landscape littered with the remnants of chattel slavery and darkened by the shadow of prejudice and injustice echoes deeply in the natural imagery of “Between the World and Me.” While pondering the skull and the remnants of that tragic night, the speaker is transported back to that awful moment. Though the speaker comes upon the site in the morning, just as "the sun poured yellow surprise into the eye sockets of a stony skull", he feels the ground grip his feet and his heart being "circled by icy walls of fear-". Wright climatically juxtaposes images of violence, religion, and childhood innocence, are brilliantly contrasted by the understated ending in which speaker and skeleton quietly become one. In his dark reverie he imaginatively becomes the unfortunate victim: shivering in the cold of the night wind, hearing the yelps of the pursuing hounds, surrounded by the crowd of cruel faces, bloodied and tortured by callous and inhumane hands. The ignominies he vicariously suffers-beating, sexual humiliation, tarring-and-feathering, and incineration-drive home the horrors of the actual African-American experience in a shockingly immediate