The continuing battle which Baldwin has waged with the spirit of Richard Wright, a battle which started in 1949 with the publication of his essay, 'Everybody's Protest Novel', is symptomatic of that tension which he was later to see, more sympathetically, in [Langston] Hughes's poetry. As evidence of this tension within his own work on the one hand he admits to a determinism not essentially different from Wright's and admits that 'we cannot escape our origins, however hard we try' while on the other he generalises from this and seeks to find in the Negro's experience an archetype for the human condition…. It is Baldwin's ability to maintain this distinction in his novels which raises his work above the naïve absolutism of Wright's. This does not imply that as a novelist he abandons faith in the validity of his own experience but that this experience is seen in the broader context of the human condition…. It is [his] ability to penetrate beyond the immediacies of injustice and prejudice … which marks his work off from that of those writers for whom the novel is an extension of the pamphlet. Like Arthur Miller he is concerned with man rather than men and the savage perception which characterises his essays survives now with the added depth and perspective of the artist. (pp. 126-28)
[We] might be forgiven for detecting [echoes of Albert Camus in Blues for Mr. Charlie]. For the grotesque code of honour which brings Richard and Lyle into direct confrontation is as arbitrary and irrational as that implacable plague which settled on Camus' Oran, while the two responses to this irrational suffering are typified in Baldwin's play by Meridian and Richard as they are in Camus' novel [The Plague] by Father Paneloux and Rieux. The one places faith in resignation or the positive power of love; the other in revolt. The parallel serves to emphasise too the crisis of faith which is the background not only to this play but also to most Negro novels and drama. As Camus' characters reject a God who can permit or even will purposeless suffering so Baldwin's characters rebel against a religion which preaches passivity and yet which can be made to endorse violence…. Yet the dialogue which Baldwin wages with himself, through the person of Richard, remains finally unresolved. For where Rieux had contained his revolt within a determination to heal, Richard's death is a gesture of rebellion not essentially different from the 'unrewarding rage' which had led Bigger Thomas to strike out against the white world. Baldwin has always been supremely conscious of the rage with which the Negro confronts the white world and has insisted that 'the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you.' The dilemma in which he finds himself in Blues for Mr. Charlie is that Richard's rage is the substance of his rebellion and if it destroys him it also constitutes his strength. For while the white world can afford to ignore and persecute the non-violent demonstrators organised by Meridian it cannot avoid the direct challenge represented by Richard and if that challenge leads inevitably to his death then there is a logic to that progression as disturbing but as direct as that which governed Bigger Thomas's career. (pp. 130-31)
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