John Edgar Wideman’s Hurry Home: The Confused World of Black Intellectual

Wideman’s second novel, Hurry Home, is the story of a black intellectual confused in defining his self, and uncertain about his relationship with the family and the community. As a black writer, Wideman himself appears to be ambivalent about the psychological make-up of his protagonist, the black writer-intellectual. The uncertainty of Wideman’s inner faculty percolates down the psyche of his protagonist whose alienation from his own black community is the central idea Wideman desires to analyze. While A Glance Away happens to be a narrative from the perspective of a white intellectual, Hurry Home is the story unfolded from the point of view of a black intellectual. This way, it can be said that the present novel is a narrative in which the writer analyses the alienation of a black intellectual from his own community, and makes him pivotal in the present scheme of the narrative. Additionally, Wideman, as black intellectual, has a candid propensity to use the technique of mainstream modernism. Therefore, the alienation of the black intellectual has also been given mainstream voice of the modernist tradition.