The Man Who Was Almost a Man (Criticism)

Criticism

Sarah Madsen Hardy

Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she discusses the significance of the gun as a symbol of manhood in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.”

“Shucks, a man oughta hava little gun aftah he done worked hard all day,” muses Dave, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s short story “The Man Who Was Almost a Man.” A man ought to have a little gun. Throughout the story, Dave, who is almost but not quite a man, never wavers in this conviction that a gun will make the difference and signal the manhood to which he aspires.

In this sense, Dave provides an interpretation of the significance of the gun, the story’s central literary symbol. Armed with a gun, Dave believes that he will no longer be scared. He will be powerful and respected. However, through both plot and narration Wright is careful to show that Dave is naive and misguided in this belief.

For one, Dave is childish in his strategy for getting a gun. “Mebbe Ma will lemme buy one when she gits mah pay from ol man Hawkins,” Dave speculates, sounding every bit a boy as he resolves, “Ahma beg her t gimme some money.” He is childish when he tries to solve the problems that ensue after his mishandling of the old revolver, attempting to plug the bullet hole he has shot in the mule’s side with dirt and telling a “story he knew nobody believed” about how she died.

The story is crushingly sad. Dave makes a bid for more respect only to inspire shame and humiliation. He ends up further entrapped in a situation that made him feel diminished — something less than a man and also, perhaps, less than a person. The symbol of manhood in which Dave has invested so much — both financially and emotionally — fails him. This would seem to be proof that a gun does not make a man after all.

Is Wright really debunking the idea that a gun can make the difference between being almost and fully a man? Even after it leads to Dave’s humiliation and financial ruin, the obsolete weapon has an almost magical power in his eyes and holds a power that he cannot give up. At the end of the story Dave holds it in his hand almost like a charm as he jumps aboard a passing train and leaves his family, his past, his mistake, and his debt behind.

The story’s abrupt ending, when Dave spontaneously flees, offers a reprieve from the suffocating fate he seemed to have brought down on himself. I am interested in how the gun and its exhilarating effect — which is, on the one hand, central to Dave’s folly — ends up, on the other, empowering Dave to make a move that is a truer assertion of independence, if a desperate one.

The main events of the story expose Dave’s ideas about the gun as completely wrong. Every result Dave had wished for is ironically reversed. But it does not seem to me that Wright’s intention is to completely dismantle Dave’s fantasy that the gun will bring him some kind of desperately needed power to transform himself.

The idea that a gun symbolizes power is so prevalent it may seem barely worth stating. Yet since Wright seems to be saying that in a way Dave is wrong and in a way he is right in his belief that a gun makes a man, thinking about the different kinds of power it represents is important for understanding the meaning behind Wright’s deceptively simple symbolism.

To begin on a most literal level, a gun gives its carrier power through the threat of physical violence. After all, the South was not safe for young black men in the 1920s when the story is set. Thousands of black men were summarily executed by mobs of whites for petty or unproven crimes in a practice called lynching. In fact, in the unfinished novel of which Wright originally conceived the story as a part, the protagonist hears word that a laborer in the next county has been lynched shortly before the events that make up “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” begin.

However, it is significant that in the version Wright did publish there is no mention of lynching and no other imminent sense of physical danger for Dave. He seems to have no concept of the practical use of a gun at all. He never refers to needing a gun to defend himself or wanting to shoot someone out of a sense of anger, vengeance, or justice. He doesn’t want to use the gun so much as he wants to possess it.

“Lawd, ef Ah only had tha pretty one! He could almost feel the slickness of the weapon with his fingers. If he had a gun like that he would polish it and keep it shining so it would never rust. N Ah’d keep it loaded, by Gawd!” Rather than being either criminal or revolutionary, his attitude toward the gun is somewhere between consumerist and erotic longing.

This brings us to the next interpretation of the kind of power a gun represents. The most familiar symbolic meaning of a gun, popularized through a method of interpretation called psychoanalysis, is that it represents the phallus or the male sex organ. This interpretation is useful because it directly connects guns to the idea of manhood. To have a gun is to have a phallus — the embodiment of manhood. Isn’t this exactly what Dave is after?

The next question is this: If Dave isn’t interested in the practice of physical violence, what kind of power does the gun provide as a phallic symbol? According to psychoanalysis, the phallus doesn’t have to do with anatomical parts or sex per se so much as it has to do the status and authority associated with masculinity. The phallus represents power of the father within the male-dominated family and, by extension, the male-dominated society. Actual fathers may or may not have the patriarchal power that is associated with fathers in general.

Thus, it is significant that the plot pivots on the fact that Dave’s father does not have a gun. His father does appear to be an authoritative figure at the dinner table when he asks Dave gruffly how his work is going, but Dave knows to go to his mother for the two dollars he needs to buy the gun. When he first approaches his mother she calls him a fool. It is only when he reminds her, “Pa ain got no gun. We needa gun in the house,” and tells her he loves her that she agrees to give him the money to buy it and bring it back to his father.

Notice that despite his father’s masculine manner, he lacks the power associated with manhood that Dave has identified as crucial: “Shucks. A man oughta hava little gun aftah he done worked hard all day.” Dave’s father works hard but he doesn’t have a gun and neither does he have the power to make household financial decisions. It is Dave’s mother who keeps “a slender wad of bills” stowed in the top of her stocking.

In this case, the phallic power that Dave seeks is not modeled on what his father has but on what he lacks. Therefore, let me suggest that the allure of the gun does not, as one might suppose, have to do with Dave becoming a man like his father but instead with his sense that the conditions of his father’s life prevent even him from being fully a man.

Dave’s father is presumably a farm laborer; so is Dave. His father earns his money through manual labor and he asserts his authority through the threat of beatings. He is, therefore, physically powerful. However, his father lacks access to some other order of power that Dave knows exists, even if he does not have the tools to describe quite what it is. His father lacks the power connected to the catalogue, money, and, of course, the gun — which, in the story, serves as an object of economic exchange more than an object of physical violence.

Dave’s world is not only male-dominated, it is divided by racial and economic forms of dominance according to which the father is divested of some important forms of phallic power. Dave’s mother holds the family purse strings, but it is the white storekeeper Joe and the white landowner Hawkins who determine the value of guns and mules and labor. It is through association with exactly these more subtle forms of power that the gun represents true or full manhood for Dave.

Dave’s father represents the rural southern life, physical labor, and passive compliance with the white power structure that echo conditions of slavery under which his own father’s generation suffered. Dave lacks the tools to analyze his father’s conditions of oppression or his own but he does have a sense, as he trudges from Hawkins’ field to his humble home, that as long as he walks the same path as his father he will remain in some ways profoundly powerless.

By keeping the gun and hopping aboard a northbound train, he at least opens up the possibility of a new kind of manhood in the future. With this impulsive act, Dave becomes part of a historic migration of African Americans seeking new beginnings and economic opportunities in the booming industries of northern cities.

For Wright, the son of a Mississippi farm laborer who sought his fortune in Chicago, the figure of the rural southern father fails to offer an acceptable model of manhood, leaving sons to face a future of “almost manhood” or to take a chance on an unknown future and pay the painful price of leaving the past — with ties of community and family — behind.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, “Gun Power” for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Wright’s first and best-known collection of short stories, explores the legacy of slavery and the psychology of oppression among blacks of the deep South.
• Native Son (1940), Wright’s most celebrated work, was the first novel by an African American to become a bestseller. It tells the controversial story of a young black man’s anger and rebellion.
• Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), offers an insightful portrait of African-American identity and race relations at the turn of the century. Its author, James Weldon Johnson, is considered an important precursor to Wright.
• Invisible Man (1952), written by Ralph Ellison, was a best-selling novel and a National Book Award winner. This landmark novel offers a powerful account of a black man’s struggle as he migrates to a northern city.
• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a semi-autobiographical classic by James Baldwin, tells of a minister’s son’s search for identity in 1935 Harlem.
• Makes Me Want to Holler (1994), an autobiography about growing up black and male in the 1970s by Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall, describes his experiences with violence, prison, and the education system.