At the end of the novel Richard Wright is attempting to reunite and reconcile with his old friends from the communist party, he was earlier kicked out of, he approaches them, only to be ignored, at the May Day parade. Two white men beat him up and throw him out of the parade, and instead of intervening the black members from the communist party sit by and watch, failing to intervene or stop this.
Wright is baffled at their lack of courage or awareness and eventually comes to a powerful realization. Formerly he was trying to evoke a sense of unity among his black peers, but comes to understand that uniting the entire black population to stand up against the whites and fight for their justice is pointless, because in reality his life has shown him no sense of even "human life," that really it is all people within the nation that are "going down the same drain." Within this realization he understands that his only way in freeing himself or enabling himself to feel connected to the world, was to try and create a "echo" an awareness or knowledge that he has gained through his experiences, and his most effective mechanism is to write and allow his thoughts to become tangible through words.