A Critical Interpretation of Black Humor in Charles Wright's the Messenger and the Wig

Charles Wright is one of the experimental American novelists of the mid-sixties and is concerned with depicting the absurdity of life in a world that threatens to destroy man’s sovereign self. As a black humourist, he not only highlights the black man’s despair in the white dominated America, but also the general condition of man in a hostile universe. He has placed his characters in the most bizarre setting to bring out man’s utter helplessness in the world. He tries to show how man becomes an easy victim of both the cosmic and social forces in the present day world. But despite his treatment of the bleak universe of human beings, Wright’s vision of life is not dominated by cynicism and despair. In this paper an attempt has been made to show how by incorporating into his fiction the vision of black humour Wright presents a constructive vision of life by not choosing an alternative to the meaningless and purposeless life, but by complementing it with a spirit of laughter which should help man in confronting life with courage and fortitude. His treatment of black man as a paradigm of the precarious human condition divorces him from other black novelists of the protest tradition. Whereas the writers of the protest tradition are occupied with the specific nature of black man’s problems, Wright is concerned with the idea that the black man, by his special burden in history, becomes the ultimate metaphor of the general human condition.