Modernism in Faulkner and Wright: Term Paper

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Both short stories also contain an estrangement of place -- neither young man can seem to find a home in either the North or South. At the beginning Faulkner's tale, Samuel is utterly lost to the South. He does not sound like a Southerner to the census taker at the beginning of the tale, and his clothing suggests a Northern dandy. (Faulkner 351) Later, Samuel's grandmother Mollie's insists that her grandson has been sold into Egypt, like a Israelite slave from the Old Testament, as if the North were more of a place of bondage than the divided South. At "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" the end of the sorry tale may seem to give the reader some higher hope, as it ends on a theme of flight from the South. The protagonist makes a decision to flee the area he has been bound to, as a result of his folly, and jump the rails to head to the North. But it is ambiguous at the end if Dave's decision is, like his obsession with buying a gun, an attempt to make a man of himself that will simply end in failure. The language he uses towards the train echoes the language he uses regarding the gun that nearly costs him his freedom, as well as his life. "Ahead the long rails were glinting in the moonlight, stretching away, away to somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man..." The story ends (Wright, 1960) Ironically, at the end of Faulkner's tale, Samuel is brought back South to his grandmother on a train, in a coffin.

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Moreover, African-American masculinity was threatened during the time when "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" takes place, offering a useful context for Dave's struggle for manhood and respect.

Samuel can only be reunited in death with his grandmother, after a White man raises the money, so the boy can be brought to Mollie in a coffin. This highlights the importance of money in both texts. Dave is obsessed with buying a gun, Mollie with getting enough money to buy the fare back home for the body of her son. Yet neither the gun nor the physical body really returns the man himself, to manhood or joy in this modernist vision. "Neither religion nor might makes on a man. Just two dollahs? Shucks, Ah could buy tha when Ah git mah pay." (Wright, 1960) but even when they have money, peace does not come easily to either Dave or the people who love Samuel.

At the end of both tales, neither man is complete. Dave is in flight from his family as well as his region, his job, and his debt. Samuel is dead, and all of the Northern clothes and speech that Dave coverts at the end of Wright's tale cannot buy his life back. Violence results in bondage for both Black men, rather than freedom. Yet neither the future nor the past really offers a viable alternative for constructing a positive sense of a Black, empowered human self for either Faulkner or Wright.

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