Section B: NON – AFRICAN DRAMA
A RAISIN IN THE SUN – LORRAINE HANSBERRY
What is the significance of Karl Linder’s visit to the Youngers?
Explanation
Karl Lindner is a whitemen. He visits the Younger home twice on the same day. The purpose of his visits is to persuade the Youngers not to move into the house that Mama has bought in Clybourne Park for the family. These visits are significant for understanding some aspects of the world of the play.
The day Lindner goes to see the Youngers they are preparing to move. “The Man” meets Beneatha, Ruth and Walter. Mama is out. Lindner’s mission is simple: The Clybourne Park Improvement Association has sent him to let ” you people” know that they do not want the Younger family in the neighbourhood, for the whitemen there come from “a common background” to which the Youngers are unwanted aliens. He assures Walter that the ” overwhelming majority of our people out there feel that people get along better, take more of a common interest in the life of the community when they share a common background.” For that reason, the whitemen want “to buy the house from you at a financial gain to your family.” The mission fails as Walter orders Lindner out of the house. As he goes out perplexed, Lindner leaves his card.
Lindner’s second visit is at the invitation of Walter. Ostensibly, Walter wants to seal the deal of the sale of the house. But this does not happen. Walter has been inspired by his mother’s fighting spirit to reject the offer of Lindner with finality. Lindner, of course, does not understand fully as he departs.
These visits are significant for understanding the Negro experience and the black-white relationship in America. Bobo’s intervening report of the loss of the family money that Walter has handed over to Willy Harris for the liquor business gives the family a philosophical outlook. Walter learns from here and takes the bold decision. It will be incompatible with the family’s pride to agree to sell the house since “ain’t nobody in my family never let anybody pay iern no money that was a way of telling us we wasn’t fit to walk the earth.” This is how succinctly Mama explains what Lindner seeks to do. Because “we ain’t never that poor “, the family must stick to its purpose and move into the new house. Mama is larger than life, as they say, and her stand establishes her as such. The speed with which waiter picks the import of the philosophy is astonishing. This is a proud family and must hang on hope with tenacity. It is this that makes Walter decline Lindner’s offer with finality and for which Mama commends Walter as having `finally come into his manhood’.
Though Lindner protests that his visit and the Clybourne Park residents’ resistance to the Younger family’s occupation of the property has no racial implications or racist undertones, that is not what the visit shows. The whiteman wishes to have little to do with the Negro as a neighbour. It is Lindner’s conviction and that of the white community in CLybourne Park that our Negro families are happier when they live in their own communities”.
Lindner’s visits, therefore, reveal the reality of whie rejection of Negroes as neighbours and the determination of the Negroes to improve the circumstances of their life at all cost.