The Man Who Lived Underground

by Richard Wright

And then a strange and new knowledge overwhelmed him: He was all people. In some unutterable fashion he was all people and they were he; by the identity of their emotions they were one, and he was one with them. And this was the oneness that linked man to man, in life or death.

This tendency of freely juxtaposing totally unrelated images and symbols and then tying them into some overall concept, mood, feeling, is a trait of Negro thinking and feeling that has always fascinated me.

Surrealism is a manner of looking at the world, a way of feeling and thinking, a method of discovering relationships between things; it is a phase of the creative process.

From the character’s point of view this breaking, in my opinion, represents a point in life where the past falls away and the character must, in order to go on living, fling himself upon the face of the formless night and create a world, a new world, in which to live. To me—rightly or wrongly—the hallmark of good writing resides precisely in this sense of creating the new, the freedom and the need and the desire to create this new.

If dream is tradition, then ritual is waking sleep.