Bigger Thomas A Tragic Hero

Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, to a poor family on a plantation in Mississippi. His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a well-educated teacher. Due to his family’s poverty they were forced to move to Memphis. When Wright was five years old, his father left his family for another woman, and his mother was forced to leave her job as a school teacher and do domestic work to provide for her family. As Wright grew up, he became involved with the Communist Party, and in 1940 he published Native Son. This success of Wright’s book made the black community proud of him, but it also brought a lot of uncomfortable feelings. They felt that the main character, Bigger, portrayed a stereotypical, harsh, black man the

Richard Wright writes, “Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can starve from a lack of bread.” Throughout all of America’s history and today, people of color, specifically African Americans, have been treated maliciously and unethically. In Native Son by Richard Wright, Wright tells the story of a young, African American man named Bigger who lives in a segregated Chicago, Illinois. Furthermore, Wright describes the frightful feelings that Bigger has towards white people by placing Bigger in a situation that involves murder. By doing this, Wright was able to decipher Bigger’s thought process and explain it to the readers. As a result, Wright created a masterpiece. Native Son should be read

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

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.

It was when Bigger had driven Mary and her boyfriend Jan around the park until they arrived at the Dalton’s house a little before 2 A.M. She was terribly drunk and couldn’t move so Bigger had to carry her into the house, up the stairs, and into her bedroom where he laid her. The quote from the text states, “Mary’s fingernails tore at his hands and he caught the pillows and covered her entire face with it, firmly.” (85 Wright) In this quote it clearly had shown that Mary was struggling for air when Bigger had the pillow over head. She was desperately clawing at his hand until she had eventually went limp. Bigger didn’t want to believe she died but he knew what he had done when she went totally limp after being smothered. It was Bigger that who was at

Early within the novel Wright establishes Bigger as a force to be feared when Bigger causes his younger sister, Vera, to faint by dangling a freshly killed rat before her face. As his mother, Ma, tends to Vera she sobs, “Boy, sometimes I wonder what makes you act like you do” (Wright 7). This shows that Bigger has a history of acting in an insensitive manner towards members of his own family. If his lack of sensitivity is not enough to isolate him from those within his own family, the consequences of those actions are surely enough to. Additionally, Bigger extends these tactless acts to his friend and gang member, Gus, and love interest, Bessie.

Bigger acted irrationally, suffocating Mary on accident in order to prevent himself from getting caught. He then took her down to the basement and attempted to place her in the furnace. After realizing her head would not fit in the furnace, he “whacked at the bone with the knife. The head hung limply on the newspapers, the curly black hair dragging about in blood. He whacked harder, but the head would not come off”(Wright, 92). This act of extreme violence is exactly what Wright intended to show. This act of “taboo” contrasted greatly from what was seen and expected of the Negro man during this time. The act of Bigger raping and killing Bessie also shows Wright’s usage of shock value. Bigger and Bessie hide out in an abandoned home after the police comes to the realization that Bigger killed Mary. As they hide out, Bigger sees Bessie as a liability and comes to the conclusion that he must kill her. As he smashes her head in with the

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.

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.

  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

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.

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

“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.