Richard Wright's The Man Who Was Almost A Man

In Richard Wright’s short story “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” Dave Saunders, the seventeen-year-old protagonist, assumes that the only way to become a respected, dignified, adult man is to own a gun. Dave is unable to identify himself as a man because the people around him “talk to him as though he were a little boy.” Although Dave eventually buys a gun, his actions prior to and after the purchase of the gun such as his reaction when he is with adult men him killing the mule, and his act of running away from his problems suggest that he is not mature enough to become a man.
Dave’s unreadiness to be a man is depicted by the way he reacts to his father and Joe, the store owner who sells Dave the gun. Before Dave buys the gun, he boldly encounters attempts to ask “fat Joe” for a gun catalog, then his “courage began to ooze.” By describing Joe as fat, a contrast is made between Joe’s masculinity and Dave’s
Dave whines about how “all he did was work” and in return “[his parents] would treat [him] like a mule, n then they beat him.” Dave travels in the boxcar of a train without knowing its destination in order to avoid this beating. The dignified, adult man that Dave hopes to be would not run away from his beating, but rather see it as his parents helping him to prevent this mistake in the future. Subsequently, as Dave realizes he is required to pay the fine for the dead mule, he reacts by stating, “tha means it'll take bout two years. Shucks! Ah'll be dam!” This hints that Dave will attempt to evade his responsibility, which he does. As a potential well-respected adult man, Dave should not have avoided this task because it served as a test of his manliness; a test to see if he would face his responsibilities like a man or run away like a boy. Since Dave chose to avoid this task, he proved that he is just a