Bigger Thomas A Tragic Hero

In the film “Native Son” by Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas is the main character of this film. In the begging Bigger had to kill a rat, he lived with just is sisters and mother meaning he had no father figure in his life. Bigger went straight to the streets with his friends to plan a robbery on the Bum’s store. They felt like since the owner was a white male they needed to bring guns; the plan fell threw. Bigger gets a job offer from the Daltons family, he goes to watch a movie about the daughter Mary Dalton. Leads to Bigger finding out that Mary is dating a communist and that herself is rebelling against her family. After the movie he met up with his friends again and when one of them are late Bigger gets full of anger bringing out a knife of his friend. After the argument with his friends Bigger goes

The novel Native Son by Richard Wright tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living on the South Side of Chicago. Due to the severe oppression and racism he has faced throughout his entire life, the reader is shown how Bigger has no control over his life and is driven to extreme actions as a result of his fear and anger. Wright displays how media and popular culture in the novel serve as powerful driving forces in emphasizing the destructive racial prejudices that are present in society as a way to solidify these ideas in the minds of its members. Through presenting the media in such a light, Wright criticizes how the media inaccurately presents information to the public

In his most famous novel, Native Son, Richard Wright's female characters exist not as self-sufficient, but only in relation to the male figures of authority that surround them, such as their boyfriends, husbands, sons, fathers, and Bigger Thomas, the protagonists. Wright presents the women in Native Son as meaningless without a male counterpart, in which the women can not function as an independent character on their own. Although Wright depicts clearly the oppression of Blacks, he appears unconscious of creating female characters who regardless of race, are exploited and suppressed. Their sole purpose in the novel is to further the story by putting Bigger in new and more dangerous situations by

A victim of the same impoverished environment as Shakur, Bigger personifies violence in the form of the real murders of Mary Dalton and Bessie, unlike Shakur who only talks and sings of murder. In Native Son, Wright, for better or for worse, presents his readers with an entity in Bigger Thomas who achieves self realization only after murder, and this characterization suggests violence presents a kind of road which winds down into self consciousness and self awareness, a road many African Americans, most notably gangster rappers, cannot help but continue to travel on today.

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, alienation, the state of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or be involved in, is a major theme presented in the novel. The protagonist, Bigger Thomas, faces alienation repeatedly from society due to his identity as a young African American boy living in Chicago. Because of his skin color, in different places, he felt inferior to everyone around him and felt like he had no purpose in his life because of society’s expectations: African Americans ending up in a jail cell for the rest of their lives, making them feel worthless. As a result, he went looking for that power without knowing it. When he killed both Mary and Bessie, he felt that power rush to him. However, Bigger does end up in jail because of his wrong doings. Even though justice was served for the killings of Mary Dalton and Bessie, he did not deserve such a harsh sentence just because he is a darker skin tone compared to the Whites.

The use of media negatively influences Bigger’s opinions of himself. Bigger’s fear of society and white people becomes overwhelming when he accidentally murders Mr. Dalton’s daughter,

Although Native Son by Richard Wright was set in Chicago in the 1930s instead of the South, Jim Crow laws were still a big deal. Being a bigger city in the north, Chicago came with more opportunities, but it gave black people a taunting sense of possible achievement that the segregation took away. They were forced to live in overpriced small tenants in the black belt, while being oppressed by white people in the racist, stereotype-filled society. This caused Bigger Thomas, the protagonist, to react more unmanageable than he would have had if he was living in the South. The crippling racism and Jim Crow laws oppressing African Americans in the racist, white controlled society of America led to the dangerous creation of “Native Sons” like Bigger Thomas, which Richard Wright depicts through exaggerating how the media portrays black and white people, using the motif revolved around blindness, and showing the violence and hatred that is instilled in the protagonist.

Out of these four types of betrayals, Bigger Thomas committed two. One in his lying to the Dalton family and killing their daughter, Mary, and a second because when he committed such offences against the Daltons, he also betrayed his family due to the fact that he was the man of the household and was expected to provide for his family, which he failed to do when he murdered two innocent women and was then executed. When he accidentally smothered Mary in her sleep, Bigger immediately panicked, and his first thought was to hide the body. Finally deciding to put her body in the furnace so there would be no evidence of her even coming home from a gala, he then had to behead the corpse in order to make it fit into the opening. Bigger had said that he had never felt more alive than before, as if finally acting on his impulses freed him from the prison he had been living in for so long.

Young describes race as “the tool to organize the distribution of power and resources and to define legal status” (1042). Race has been always been a way to divide people and determine a person’s importance in society. In the book, Native Son, by Richard Wright, the ideology of discrimination is explored through its main character, Bigger Thomas. Bigger and his family live in a rat infested apartment and struggle to make ends meet. Bigger is ultimately forced to take a job working for a white family in efforts to relieve some of the stress put on his poverty infected family. While having a conversation with his friend about how the black community is treated by the white people around them, Bigger poses the questions, “Why they make us live in one corner of the city? Why don’t they let us fly planes and run ships” (Wright 20). Bigger feels that because he is black, he will forever be held back from his full potential. He addresses the racism and oppression he is forced into by white society and is starting to realize the affects it is having on his life. Later on in the novel, Bigger kills a white woman who is a member of the wealthy family he works for named, Mary Dalton. Initially, the murder is accidental but Bigger then unmercifully decapitates her body and burns it in a furnace, in efforts to hide all evidence. Bigger’s unnecessary actions after the manslaughter are based solely on his fear of the white community and what would happen to him in consequence for

The alarm clock that opens Richard Wright’s 1940 classic Native Son was not only a wakeup call to the nation, but to the American Communist Party: an institution that Wright supported, despite its own shortcomings in advocating for the rights of Black Americans.

20-year-old Bigger Thomas lives with his brother, sister, and mother in a one room apartment on the south side of Chicago. He is being offered a job as a chauffeur driver but considers robbing a white man’s store with his friends. Later in the day, he is hired as the chauffeur for the Daltons, a rich white family. His first job is to drive their young daughter Mary to university at night, but she makes him drive to her to meet up with her communist boyfriend Jan Erlone. They make Bigger eat dinner with him in public and try to befriend him, but it makes him uncomfortable. Later that night, Mary is too drunk to make it up the stairs by herself, so Bigger helps her into her room. Mrs. Dalton, her blind mother, comes into the room to check on Mary. Fearing that Mary would expose his being

  In Native Son, Wright employs Naturalistic ideology and imagery, creating the character of Bigger Thomas, who seems to be composed of a mass of disruptive emotions rather than a rational mind joined by a soul. This concept introduces the possibility that racism is not the only message of the novel, that perhaps every person would feel as isolated and alone as Bigger does were he trapped in such a vicious cycle of violence and oppression. Bigger strives to find a place for himself, but the blindness he encounters in those around him and the bleak harshness of the Naturalistic society that Wright presents the reader with close him out as effectively as if they had shut a door in his

“Now that he had killed Mary, he felt a lessening tension in his muscles, he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried,” (page 114). We can come to a conclusion that Bigger felt a big “burden” being lifted off of his shoulders. We can all agree that when we feel something being off oh our shoulders, it is like being able to breathe and feel free. An addition to his many qualities, he is able to plan everything and this is an important aspect in Bessie’s killing. Before anyone knowing what happened to Mary, Bigger took advantage of this situation by writing a ransom note that got him what he wanted, which was money and pinning the murder on the “REDS.”The word “Red” which he had signed to the ransom note throw them off the track and make them still think that Jan or his comrades did it,” (page 192).

Richard Wright’s novel, Native Son, depicts the life of the general black community in Chicago during the 1930’s. Though African Americans had been freed from slavery, they were still burdened with financial and social oppression. Forced to live in small, unclean quarters, eat foods on the verge of going bad, and pay entirely too much for both, these people struggled not to be pressured into a dangerous state of mind (Bryant). All the while, they are expected to act subserviently before their oppressors. These conditions rub many the wrong way, especially Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the story. Though everyone he is surrounded by is going through all the same things that he is, growing up poor and uneducated has made Bigger angry at the whole world. You can see this anger in everything he does, from his initial thoughts to his final actions. Because of this, Bigger Thomas almost seems destined to find trouble and meet a horrible fate. Wright uses these conventions of naturalism to develop Bigger’s view of the white community(). With all of these complications, Bigger begins to view all white people as an overwhelming force that drags him to his end. Wright pushes the readers into Bigger’s mind, thoroughly explaining Bigger’s personal decay. Even Wright himself says that Bigger is in fact a native son, just a “product of American culture and the violence and racism that suffuse it” (Wright).

The oppression that Bigger experiences from his mother is the root of his tendency to want control. She deprives him of his own identity which leaves him to do the only natural thing: create one. Bigger also has control over Buddy, but he does not need to use violence to accomplish it because Buddy is entranced with everything that Bigger does. Wright also foreshadows the events of the novel in the opening scene. The rat is a symbol of the white world’s view of Bigger: an annoying and dangerous monstrosity who does not belong in a civilized environment. Literally, Bigger must gain control over the rat due to his compulsion to commit violent acts. Bigger’s killing the rat symbolizes his destruction of himself that he creates through the violence that he commits.