Justice and Truth in Literature

Paper Summary:

There often exists great distance between laws and people's concepts of justice and truth. This paper examines what two authors have to say about the subject. Both Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in "Crime and Punishment," and Richard Wright, in "Native Son", write about men who have been pushed beyond reason into murder, and both authors ask us what justice means in such a context. The paper shows how both novels ask us to decide for ourselves what moral action is possible in a society in which justice is scarce.

From the Paper:

"Wright's depiction of such a world is the more disturbing to us because it takes place within our own culture. We like to believe that such thing, that such a level of injustice, happens in other places, but Wright brings it home to America, albeit to a time before we ourselves were born. Wright and Bigger make us see the fragile nature of social justice and the ways in which the courts are as likely to pervert justice as to ensure it."

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