Rhetorical Devices In Black Boy By Richard Wright

Author, Richard Wright, in his autobiography, “Black Boy” reflects back on the struggle he had to go through during his early childhood. Wright’s purpose is to inform the readers about the struggles he had had to go through as a black boy in the South during the Jim Crow era. Wright’s other purpose is to express his feelings about what happened to him and what he saw along the way. In order to write the novel “Black Boy,” Richard Wright uses many rhetorical devices. Some of the many rhetorical devices he uses are apostrophe, comparison, descriptive language, and curiosity. First let’s start with the many apostrophe’s Wright uses in his novel, “Black Boy”.
“Richard, you are a very bad, bad boy,” she said. “I don’t care,” I repeated. I avoided …show more content…
“ I was dreaming of running and playing and shouting, but the vivid image of Granny’s old, white, wrinkled, grim face, framed by a halo of tumbling black hair, lying upon a huge feather pillow, made me afraid.” (Wright 3) “ I pulled out the broom and tore out a batch of straws and tossed them into the fire and watched them smoke, turn black, blaze…” (Wright 4) “ The distress I sensed in her voice was as sharp and painful as the lash of a whip on my flesh.” (Wright 6) “ There was the aura of limitless freedom distilled from the rolling sweep of a tall green grass swaying and glinting in the wind and sun.” (Wright 45) “There was the slow, fresh, saliva-stimulating smell of cooking cotton seeds.” (Wright 45) “There was the puckery taste that almost made me cry when I ate my first half-ripe permission. There was the greedy joy in the tangy taste of wild hickory nuts.” (Wright 46) “It was summer and the smell of clay dust was everywhere, day and night.” (Wright 49) “I would get up early every morning to wade with my bare feet through the dust of the road, reveling in the strange mixture of the cold dew-wet crust on top of the road and the warm, sun baked dust beneath.” (Wright 49) “After a moment or two I heard shrill screams coming from the rear room of the store; later the woman stumbled out, bleeding, crying holding her stomach, her clothes torn.” (Wright 179) “When I rose the next morning the temperature had dropped below zero. The house was as cold to me as the southern streets had been in winter.” (Wright 263) To elaborate on these many extracts from this autobiography you can see that Richard wanted to inform us about the things he saw, heard, felt and tasted from his different childhood