“The Man Who Was Almost a Man” by Richard Wright

“The Man Who Was Almost a Man” is an initiation story, a tale of a teenage youth struggling to break free of childhood and enter the world of adulthood. Frustrated by being young, poor, and black, David Glover wrestles with the tension of wanting to be an adult yet being viewed as a child by the adult community. In David's case, the action that he takes to acquire manhood merely reinforces his elders' beliefs that he is still an adolescent. When the story opens, David is thinking about his quest for manhood, which he connects with owning a gun. Because he is “almos a man,” he believes that he should own the symbol of manhood: a gun.

The question of how one becomes initiated into adulthood pervades this story, beginning with the first paragraph, in which David tells himself that someday he is “going to get a gun and practice shooting, then they couldn't talk to him as though he were a little boy.” Because he is seventeen, he muses, he is “almos a man.” Almost a man, however, is a dangerous age to be, for David is neither child nor adult; he is in that painful transitional period between the two (Fabre, 37)

Although he is neither fish nor fowl, neither child nor adult, David demonstrates characteristics of both stages of life, sometimes simultaneously. When, for example, he decides to purchase a gun, a step that will symbolize and initiate him into manhood, he resorts to the childish manipulation of his mother to persuade her to allow him to make the purchase. When he actually fires the gun to demonstrate that he is indeed a man, he is literally overpowered, as a child would be, by the power of the weapon. His final ...