Wright and Dostoevsky
Both Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in Crime and Punishment and Richard Wright, in Native Son look to men who have been pushed beyond reason into murder, and both authors ask us what justice means in such a context. The answers that the authors provide are quite different - which should hardly be surprising since both authors suggest that ideas of justice must reflect the local realities of life in a given place and time and the settings for each of the novels is dramatically different. But the answers that each provides are also strikingly open-ended: We must ourselves decide in the end what justice was granted and what denied to Both novels ask us to decide for ourselves what moral action is possible in a society in which justice is scarce, and our answer to that question in large measure will reflect our own experiences of how justice A Man With No Place To Go Wright's novel - arguably one of the most influential American books of the 20th century - relates the story of Bigger Thomas, a man who had never had a fair chance in life because of the racism he faces as an
As a black in a racist society, he was always somewhat less than fully human. We will see whether there is justice on earth!" And throwing over her head that green shawl which Marmeladov had mentioned to Raskolnikov, Katerina Ivanovna squeezed her way through the disorderly and drunken crowd of lodgers who still filled the room, and, wailing and tearful, she ran into the street--with a vague intention of going at once somewhere to find justice. Vengeance is also the wellspring of a notion of equivalence that animate justice. But those systems will again and again be challenged by the dictators and racists there is no way to ensure that the future will be more fair than the past. But more often they are not, and both Wright and Dostoesvsky show us a society in which the rules written for one group of people are applied to a different group, a different subculture altogether - with the predictably tragic results. When he was in the street he cried out, "Oh God, how loathsome it all is! And can I, can I possibly. He is abandoned by his family, who loves him but is equally powerless, his friend Jan (who is also incapable of providing any realistic help), by white members of the community that seek to help him out of a sense of social justice (or guilt), and by the criminal justice system. Murder and Repentence In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky tells what is in many ways the same story. In a democracy the law shifts from one era to the next, trying to reflect and create as great a consensus as is possible - but always leaving a large number of people outside of that consensus. The lodgers talked incoherently, some commented to the best of their ability on what had happened, others quarrelled and swore at one another, while others struck up a song. Much of the novel - and here it differs dramatically from Wright's - is taken up with Raskolnikov's attempts at justifying the murders he has committed and his coming to understand that such justifications are not in the end valid.
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Acceptance Essays
