EVERYBODY'S PROTEST NOVEL
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counter-thrust, long for each other's slow, exquisite death; death by
torture, acid, knives and burning; the thrust, the counter-thrust, the
longing making the heavier that cloud which blinds and suffocates
them both, so that they go down into the pit together. Thus has the
cage betrayed us all, this moment, our life, turned to nothing through
our terrible attempts to insure it. For Bigger's tragedy is not that he is
cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that
he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the pos–
sibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to
battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria be–
queathed him at his birth. But our humanity is our burden, our life,
we need not battle for it; we need only do what is infinitely more
difficult, that is, accept
it.
The failure of the protest novel lies in its
rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread,
power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real
and which cannot be transcended.
