Trapped in the Spider’s Web: Black Man’s Experience in The Lonely Londoners and in Native Son

Maureen Amaka Azuike,
Department of English,
University of Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria.
E-mail: amakaazuike@yahoo.com
ABSTRACT
In naturalistic sense, man is the product of his heredity and environment. Man is trapped in a vicious circle where the same conditions which humiliate him also tend to reduce the quality of his life and eventually triumph over him. The society, as it
were, spins these intolerable, extremely suffocating and self abasing conditions which dog man’s footsteps in all his endeavours. Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Richard Wright’s Native Son are novels which chronicle, among other things, the harrowing experiences of blacks as they struggle relentlessly to
survive in a racist society. In such a society, the black man is trapped and forced to lead a suffocating life of misery and poverty. To Selvon and Wright, wishful escapism is a form of survival from a social organization which inflicts pain on her citizens. Our major aim is to reveal that although the black man has a free will to
exist or the right to make choices, social and environmental forces do threaten and influence these choices thereby contributing further to his entrapment and disillusionment. Therefore, the injustices in the social structure in America, Europe
and in the West Indies are social threats which Selvon and Wright have written about and are protesting against in their works.