Manhood and Violence Theme Analysis

In “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Richard Wright explores the complicated, conflicting nature of masculinity through the eyes of Dave Saunders, a seventeen-year-old Black farm worker in the 1930s American South who believes that he can assert his masculinity by purchasing a gun. Wright has sympathy for Dave, telling much of the story in Dave’s voice and chronicling the various ways Dave is abused or humiliated, particularly by his father and the older and bigger farm workers. But Dave is also flawed, and displays negative masculine traits, such as recklessness and a brittle pride. In particular, Dave’s plan to buy a gun in order to prove himself a man ends in tragicomedy when Dave accidentally shoots and kills the mule Jenny, landing himself in serious debt and making him a figure of fun to those around him. By compassionately depicting Dave’s doomed efforts to assert his manhood, Wright acknowledges the allure of masculinity while deftly showing how society’s violent ideas about manhood—which Dave and the other characters in the story have internalized—can be oppressive and even self-destructive.

Dave wants to buy a gun because he believes that being a gun owner will make him a man, but the story makes clear that he believes this because his family and community also see violence as a central part of masculinity. Dave believes that with a gun you can “kill anybody, black or white”—a level of power and control that Dave does not normally experience. In his home life, Dave defers to his mother and especially his father, who in turn both defer to their white employer, Mr. Hawkins. Dave, further, learns about the power of violence through his father, who often beats Dave as a punishment. While Dave doesn’t imagine using the gun against his father, his desire to stand up to anyone who would “talk to him as though he were a little boy” seems to be an outlet for the aggression, fear, and frustration that his father provokes in him, but also a desire to act in his family and community the way that his father does. To get the money for the gun, Dave asks his mother, who has authority over him but not over his father. But his effort to convince his mother to give him the money is unsuccessful until he claims that he’s in fact going to buy the gun to give it to his father. His mother then gives in, admitting that his father should have a gun—she, too, believes that the “man” of a family must be able to deal violence.

Yet once Dave gets the gun, his mishandling of it shows that owning a gun can’t actually make him a man. In fact, his failed attempt at using the gun makes him a laughingstock and puts him in debt, thereby undercutting his masculinity even more. Dave’s simplistic belief that just owning a gun will make him a man makes him irresponsible and careless with it. He sleeps with the loaded gun under his pillow at night and keeps it tied against his bare thigh during the day. Dave doesn’t see skill or responsibility as being connected to manhood, and so he shows none in his handling of the gun. Ultimately, because of his lack of skill or care, Dave’s gun does the opposite of what he intends. In a darkly comic twist, he accidentally kills the mule Jenny and, rather than gaining new freedom, he ends up shackled with debt to the mule’s owner, Mr. Hawkins, and an object of ridicule among the community At the end of the story, Dave briefly considers turning the gun against Mr. Hawkins, the character who owns Dave’s debt and is most responsible for Dave’s economic oppression. But by then, Dave is already out of bullets, and he never acts on the fantasy. In this moment, Wright acknowledges the way that violence can seemingly offer the potential for freedom. However, the way violence actually functions in the story gives the lie to this fantasy. Violence in the story always leads to a vicious cycle. Dave accidentally kills the mule and undercuts rather than augments his manhood. And Dave’s father, after promising to beat his son once again, loses his son, who flees by running away.

While Wright shows the negative consequences of Dave’s actions throughout the story, the ending of the story—in which Dave runs away by hopping on a train car to a new, unspecified destination—is more ambiguous, offering a surprising possibility of hope but also the possibility that Dave will continue to follow the same destructive patterns. Dave’s decision to run away at the end of the story can be read as optimistic. It suggests, perhaps, that he has learned that he will not be able to overcome the oppression or obstacles he faces with just a gun. A railroad could represent progress and new frontiers, and in Dave’s case, the railroad could even be seen as a physical manifestation of the Underground Railroad—by leaving on a train, he is attempting to escape a life of beatings and debt slavery. At the same time, the fact that Dave purposely brings the gun with him on the train—even when it’s empty of bullets—seems to represent his continued attachment to harmful ideas about masculinity. The story’s lyrical, final line about rails stretching to a place “where he could be a man” leaves open both possibilities. It suggests, on the one hand, that Dave’s belief in violence as the core of manhood will travel with him and his obsession with being that sort of violent man will continue to haunt both him and those he encounters. But it also suggests, on the other hand, that in leaving behind his father and community and their focus on violence as a core tenet of manhood, Dave might learn another, different way of being masculine. Wright’s ambiguous final lines suggest that despite Dave’s shortcomings, and despite all the obstacles he faces, it is still too early to tell what type of man he’ll become.