(It will be recalled that Wright's then unpublished Lawd Today served as a working model for The Outsider.) Cross, in his daily dealings with the three women and his fellow postal workers feel something akin to nausea. His social and legal obligations have enslaved him. He has inherited from his mother a sense of guilt and foreboding regarding his relationship to women and his general awareness of amoral physical and sexual longings. Yet he is aloof and intellectual enough to know that the dread he experiences is psychological (i.e., it stems from his religious upbringing, the demands of his women, and the knowledge that he lives in a world devoid of reason, God, or universal values). Wright stresses here that Cross's views have been arrived at as a result of his reading and his individual relationships; and only secondarily because he is a Negro. Allusion is made early in this...
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