Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son

“Notes for a Hypothetical Novel” was a speech delivered to San Francisco State College in October 1960. In his speech, Baldwin pretended to be writing a novel in front of his audience. He carries them through his thought processes as he considers plot, character, and theme. Baldwin argues that a writer cannot separate the work from the self. The novel will always inhabit characters and elements from the author’s life. It is important to note that Baldwin’s approach is starkly different from Richard Wright’s, whom Baldwin criticized in Notes of a Native Son. Baldwin admonished Wright’s use of the protest novel, which he suggested diminished Black characters to stereotypes and caricatures. Richard Wright famously responded to Baldwin’s criticism by saying, “All literature is protest.” Baldwin returned, “All literature might be protest but all protest is not literature” (197). This essay represents Baldwin’s understanding of what makes writing literature more than protest alone.

The key to this is the way Baldwin interweaves his characters’ personal experiences into a larger context. They do not represent ideals or ideologies. Instead, their lives are influenced by the social and political framework, but they are largely unaware of how their experiences are affected by the world. Baldwin also emphasizes the need to relate his life and the lives of his characters with the reader; there must be a unifying thread that connects everyone.

Finally, Baldwin determines that this novel is about The Complexities of Identity: “I didn’t meet anyone in the world who didn’t suffer from the very same affliction that all the people I had fled from suffered from and that was that they didn’t know who they were” (149). Baldwin argues that this is a unique American problem and lies at the heart of many of the country’s social issues.