The Myth of Sisyphus in Richard Wright’s Native Son

The identification of archetypes in literary texts follows the path of deep structural analysis, as surface reading will dwell ordinarily at the level of incidents. This research is driven by the configuration of the myth of Sisyphus in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Our claim is that the myth figures in the text as a shade of the crime and punishment sequence, with an absurdist twist. This claim is substantiated following the archetypal literary theory, which employs to a great extent the methods of discourse analysis. The novel has often been read along the ideological questions that racism raises and attempts to answer. This essay marks a deviation from that seemingly jaundiced view of literature. What this essay foregrounds is the eternal regeneration of narratives, an eternalness that bears the nature of the archetype in its repetitiveness. This necessitates the choice of archetypal literary criticism as the theory for this research. To reach its conclusions, this article adopts a qualitative approach, taking its data from the events in the novel, and investigating the mythic orientations at work in the novel, with the view that at the forefront of this is the myth of Sisyphus, a shade of the myth of crime and punishment. This article does not account for the sociocultural frame of racism as a material but understands it in the wider conception of myth, as a figuration of the Sisyphean myth which shares with the racism in the text the quality of perpetuity or seeming endlessness. We show that racism is in this akin to the sufferings and struggles of Sisyphus, that it is Sisyphean.