What is the author's style in Big Black Good Man by Richard Wright?

Big Black Good Man has a third-person narrator who tells the story from Olaf Jenson's point of view. The narrator is privy to Olaf's thoughts but not to Jim's. Through this device, Jim's thoughts and intentions remain as much a mystery to readers as they are to Olaf. This means that readers see Jim through Olaf's eyes and at the same time through the lens of their own experiences and attitudes. The result is a heightening of tension and suspense. On one level, the reader gets caught up in Olaf's blind fear of Jim. At the same time, the reader stands outside the story and so has a different, more detached perspective. Depending upon his or her own race, age, and attitudes, the reader may have responses that closely match Olaf's or that conflict with them. Readers, therefore, struggle to resolve not only the tension between Olaf and Jim but also the tension between Olaf's attitudes and their own.

The story is rich in figurative language, particularly in similes and metaphors that emphasize Olaf's view of Jim as something inhuman. When Jim first appears, the narrator describes him as Olaf sees him: "His chest bulged like a barrel; his rocklike and humped shoulders hinted of mountain ridges; the stomach ballooned like a threatening stone; and the legs were like telephone poles." In these phrases, Jim is a force of nature or an inanimate object. In many other descriptions, he is an animal, with a "buffalolike head," a neck "like a bull's," "gorillalike arms," "mammoth hands," and so on. Jim is repeatedly described as anything and everything except a human being.