(It will be recalled that Wright's then unpublished Lawd Today served as a working model for The Outsider.) Cross, in his daily dealings with the three women and his fellow postal workers feel something akin to nausea. His social and legal obligations have enslaved him. He has inherited from his mother a sense of guilt and foreboding regarding his relationship to women and his general awareness of amoral physical and sexual longings. Yet he is aloof and intellectual enough to know that the dread he experiences is psychological (i.e., it stems from his religious upbringing, the demands of his women, and the knowledge that he lives in a world devoid of reason, God, or universal values). Wright stresses here that Cross's views have been arrived at as a result of his reading and his individual relationships; and only secondarily because he is a Negro. Allusion is made early in this first book that because Cross no longer believes in God, he becomes his own god and acts accordingly in somewhat symbolic fashion. One of Cross's friends describing Cross's first years in the post office recalls that Cross, convulsed with laughter, would throw money down on the street from the eleventh floor and watch the commotion of "little ant-like folks . . . scrambling and scratching and crawling" after the coins. And after the money was gone, they would look up at the window, their mouths open like "little fishes out of water," and Cross would say when they looked like that, they were praying (Joyce, 2006 p. 29).
One evening after having engineered an eight hundred dollar loan from the post office, Cross discovers himself trapped in a freak subway accident. He manages to extricate himself but finds that he has left his overcoat behind. Later he learns that another Negro who had been riding on the same car was killed and had been identified as Cross Damon since Cross's overcoat was found lying next to his smashed body. Cross suddenly realizes that inasmuch as everyone thinks him dead, he can begin life anew with no obligations. He hides for a while in a brothel-hotel to make sure that no one suspects he is still alive, and there, ironically, discovers a fellow postal worker who had attended his funeral (Shankar, 2004). Cross suddenly turns on him, knocks him unconscious, and flings him out of an eleventh story window. The following day Cross boards a train for New York, relieved somewhat of the dread that had pursued him all his life.
Cross moves from dread to "Dream," the title of Book Two. Wright indicates Cross is now "dream" (JanMohamed, 2005 p. 112) because presumably having no identity, he is unable to relate to persons and things around him. In a sense he possesses no reality but observes passively:
As silent as a mirror is believed
Realities plunge in silence by.
Not until Cross obtains a past and a social role, Wright hints, will he become a man again. On the train Cross meets two persons, each of whom will figure strongly in his life afterwards. The first is Bob Hunter, a dining car waiter, who inadvertently spills coffee on a white woman customer. The woman screams that the Negro had deliberately scalded her and threatens to report him. Hunter turns to Cross to testify for him but Cross can only give him a false name and address. The second person Cross meets is Ely Houston, a hunchback New York district attorney (Hanchard, 2001 p. 10). The two men engage in long philosophical disquisitions; not unlike Raskolnikoff and Porfiry; about crime and the ethical criminal. Both agree that there are a growing number of men and women who are finding it impossible to accept traditional Christian values. Finding themselves increasingly alienated and isolated by a mass urban industrial society, they tend to take the law into their own hands; indeed feel they have the right to break the law (Margolies, 2003 p. 112). They differ from the ordinary criminal in that the latter expects and wants to be captured; the ordinary criminal posits an orderly, coherent world against which he rebels; the ethical criminal regards the world as chaotic and meaningless. Houston and Cross both agree as well that the Negro in America is in a better position to perceive the realities of existence than the ordinary white man, inasmuch as the Negro, though Westernized, is excluded from full participation by virtue of his color (Shankar, 2004 p. 22). Cross intuits that Houston is just...
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