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

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

Cross traverses metaphysical territory explored by Dostoevsky's protagonists, but, unlike them, he does not return from the region beyond values. Wright depicts Bigger and Cross as tragic heroes, victims of their own evolving strength, admirable for their assertions of self and dignity. Unlike Dostoevsky's protagonists and Wright's Fred Daniels, they remain proudly yet tragically their own gods, achieving what Widmer calls an "heroic nothingness" (180). Dostoevsky's idea of the possibilities for moral development inherent in evil acts is adapted in a limited sense by Wright in the noble acceptance of an oppressive freedom by Bigger and Cross. But Cross's unyielding conviction of his innocence denies him the regeneration which Dostoevsky portrays as proceeding only from the recognition of evil.

Evident throughout Wright's work is his rejection of and hostility toward Christianity, which is another salient aspect of his dissent from Dostoevsky and which informs the tortured atheism of The Outsider. Wright views believers condescendingly as the weak, deluded masses of "The Grand Inquisitor," who crave submission to authority and who dread free choice. When Sarah Hunter surrenders her pain and autonomy to the church, Cross mocks her with biblical quotes and a paraphrase of the devil's words to Ivan Karamazov:" 'Perhaps God uses the Devil to guide people home'" (553). Wright presents Cross somewhat contradictorily, first as the heroic "pre-Christian man," guided by" 'nothing at all but his own desires'" (426) and placed in the modern world supposedly without the vices and neuroses inflicted by centuries of Christianity. Yet he also presents him as the victim of those ills, passed along to him by the repressive, judgmental theology of his mother, whose joyless, repressive religiosity fosters and virtually requires such fearful rebellion.

Wright skillfully if not always successfully maintains his reluctant thesis of Cross's innocence. When at the conclusion of the novel Cross is gunned down by the communists, he confides to Houston his thoughts and feelings about his quest for freedom, locating his horror not in any sense of compunction but in his blamelessness: "'It ... It was ... horrible.... I'm innocent.... That's what made the horror'" (586). In contrast to Raskolnikov, whose physical decline and mental torture signify that he is not an extraordinary person, Cross grows stronger in his resolve and his rejection of guilt over the course of his four murders. He dares to claim a "deeply forbidden" (109) innocence, as the narrator implies his heroism for breaking the bonds of everyday morality: "Cross had to discover what was good or evil through his own actions, which were more exacting than the edicts of any God because it was he alone who had to bear the brunt of their consequences with a sense of absoluteness made intolerable by knowing that this life of his was all he had and would ever have" (157). Wright attempts to deflect possible antipathy toward Cross the murderer by minimizing his responsibility and by rendering most of his victims as cruel agents of despotism. He sustains the tone of Cross's qualified innocence through the murder of his friend Joe, drawn as self-protection, and the murders of Gil, Herndon, and Hilton, which are seen as symbolic executions of the evils of collectivism. Although Cross literally "sees no evil" in his actions, like Raskolnikov he comes to expect and need at least external limitations through the recognition and punishment of law.