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

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

In imitation of the letter of Raskolnikov's mother, Cross's mother pressures him about his evident atheism and fears for his soul:" 'I need to know that you've found God, Cross.... For months now everything I've heard about you is bad'" (29). Wright also borrows directly from Crime and Punishment when Cross wonders to himself about Houston's deceptive strategies, experiences mounting frustration, and flirts with the idea of confessing:

Was Houston raising the question of the Negro to mislead him before he was told that he was under arrest? Why didn't he come right out with what he wanted? He had a foolish desire to reach forward and grab Houston's shoulder and say to him: All right; I know you're after me.... Let's get it over with. (163)

Houston frequently approximates the words of the investigator Porfiry Petrovich, as when he confides his understanding of the dark impulses of human nature and the criminal's need for punishment:

"My position's difficult... I feel outside the lives of men. Yet my job demands that I enforce the law against the outsider who breaks the law.... My greatest sympathy is for those who feel that they have a fight to break the law.... Most of them almost beg you to punish them. They would be lost without the law." (170-71)

Houston duplicates Porfiry's informal tone in seeking to convince the criminal of the investigator's sincerity and puzzlement as he asks, "'What kind of motive could such a killer have? That's what's puzzling me'" (374). The final interview between Cross and Houston, where the latter expresses compassionate, even brotherly concern for the murderer, is especially similar to that between Raskolnikov and Porfiry. Just as Porfiry drops all pretense of ambiguity and advises Raskolnikov to confess in order to avoid suicide, Houston points out the retributive torment Cross will undergo in freedom if he does not confess: "'... you made your own law.... And, by God, I, for one, am going to let you live by it.... You are going to punish yourself, see? You are your own law, so you'll be your own judge'" (571).

Wright evinces his inheritance from Dostoevsky in several key thematic concerns in The Outsider. The novel's resolution of the indeterminacy evident in Native Son on the issue of collectivism versus individual freedom owes much to Dostoevsky's own evolution from belief in radical political action and materialistic socialism to defense of the sacredness of personality. Native Son combines social protest and propagandistic defense of the Communist Party with implied criticism of its disinterest in the individual. In a manner similar to Dostoevsky in The Devils, Wright in The Outsider attacks the cynicism at the heart of supposedly humanistic organizations and movements. Dostoevsky exposes radical leaders such as Peter Verkhovensky as malicious, consciously despotic tyrants whose nominal commitment to freedom is hypocritical and overshadowed by their will to power. The analysis of collectivism in The Outsider proceeds along similar lines, focusing on its leaders' scorn for individual autonomy and its arrogation of godlike power over lives and deaths. With Cross's murders of Gil and Herndon, Wright symbolically executes these oppressors of humanity, whom he finds guilty of "'cheapening and devaluing our notions of human personality'" (490).