Haunted by innocence: the debate with Dostoevsky in Wright's 'other novel,' "The Outsider."

African American Review, Summer, 1996 by Michael F. Lynch

On the subject of Wright's influences in The Outsider, Margaret Walker Alexander, like Fabre, minimizes the roles of Camus and Sartre, and she points out that, in Wright's view, Dostoevsky was the world's greatest novelist and The Brothers Karamazov his greatest novel (53). In an interview shortly before his death, Wright explicitly stated Dostoevsky's preeminence in affecting his world view: "Ahead of all the writers who molded my philosophy concerning modern man comes Dostoevsky" (8). With Crime and Punishment, The Devils, and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky posits modern man's loss of belief as the gravest danger both to the individual and the community, and The Outsider echoes the idea of atheism as the root cause of the decay of values and social order. In characters such as Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment; Stavrogin, Shatov, and Kirilov in The Devils; and Ivan Karamazov, Dostoevsky depicts the struggle of unbelief and the assertion of extreme self-will eventually eclipsed by the genesis of some sort of faith. Wright, on the other hand, does not suggest any possible regeneration for Cross, who remains stranded in his nihilistic revolt. Wright takes the position of the earnest, reluctant atheist, one who like Ivan does not so much celebrate freedom as insist that it be accepted and explored. Ivan reasons that "there is no virtue if there is no immortality" (60), deducing an agonized amorality much like that of Cross. When Ivan finds that he is morally responsible for his father's murder, he begins the painful reversal of his unbelief. When a train wreck allows Cross to stage his death and create a new identity, he finds nothing to restrain him from killing several people at will, until he wishes belatedly to love a woman and rejoin the community. He never sees the leap of faith as even a possibility because he discovers neither his responsibility for anything or anyone nor any limit to his right to self-will. The narrator's comment that "damned is the man who must invent his own god!" (483) summarizes Wright's theme that the absence of God opens up a chasm of despair. Cross's conclusion that therefore we" 'can do damn well what we please on this earth'" (483) becomes for Wright not a source of rejoicing but of troubled reflection and tragedy.

With remarkable liberality Wright models many aspects of his novel on Crime and Punishment, partially and presumably to indicate his debt to Dostoevsky and his philosophical agreement with him in some areas. Both Raskolnikov and Cross are university dropouts in their mid-twenties who are crushingly poor but who feel that their advanced intellect makes them superior to the masses of humanity. Both suffer from debilitating physical strains such as hunger, malnutrition, and fever, along with extreme nervous tension. Both have widowed, meddling mothers who have infused guilt and a neurotic self-image into their sons, and both rebel against this moralism with radical self-assertion. Wright employs two "Sonya" characters, the first being Jenny, the prostitute who offers to go away with Cross without knowing of his first murder. Just as Dostoevsky presents Sonya as Raskolnikov's means of salvation through confession and reparation, Wright uses Eva, the second figure, to elicit a similar, unrepentant confession. But Eva's subsequent suicide, based on her moral naivete, suggests that for Cross there can be no salvation. Wright also includes a character much like Svidrigailov in Hilton, whose function is similarly to threaten the protagonist with his knowledge of the murders and whose cold-blooded amoralism suggests the protagonist's duality and participation in evil. Cross seems momentarily to recognize Hilton's evil as part of himself, but he kills him in the attempt to deny it or to extract it from himself. Wright uses Hilton's agnostic and nihilistic lecture to Cross just as Dostoevsky uses Svidrigailov's comments to enlarge Raskolnikov's self-knowledge.