How Is Lutie Johnson 's Murder Of Boots Smith And Bigger Thomas Essay

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

Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946) is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted the protagonist Lutie Johnson. Lutie is a single African American mother who lives in segregated America during the 1940’s. Throughout the novel, we see that during this time period Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis while in her pursuit of the American Dream for herself and her son Bub. Lutie is convinced that if she follows the example of Benjamin Franklin, by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent and therefore be able to move out from the Street in which she is confined to. Benjamin Franklin is embodied in the text through the character Junto. It is Junto that is supposed to get Lutie closer towards her dream. However, Junto, through his secret manipulations tries to possess Lutie sexually, ultimately leading Lutie towards her path of destruction and she ends up committing the murder of Junto’s henchman, Boots. Junto represents the writer Petry’s deep disillusionment with this cultural myth of the so-called American dream. In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), The protagonist Bigger Thomas, is a 20-year-old African American youth who grew up in segregated America during the 1930s. Throughout this novel, we see Bigger also striving towards the pursuit of the American Dream. Bigger risks everything to not compromise his pursuit towards success. Unfortunately, he ends up falling

Native Son by Richard Wright is about a black man, Bigger Thomas, who is becomes the chauffeur of the Daltons, a rich white family, and accidently kills the daughter, Mary. He attempts to cover his crime by putting the blame on someone else, but he is eventually caught and sentenced to death. Bigger deceives in an attempt avoid the consequences he knows the white world will deliver to him with and this deception contributes to Wright’s message of what racism does to the oppressed and additionally puts Wright’s communist party in a positive light.

Ann Petry’s “The Street” tells the story of Lutie Johnson, a single black mother, who is confronted with continuous injustices in the streets of Harlem. Alone and struggling to make a life for herself and her son Bub, Lutie tells a tale of an African American woman who breaks away from the story of the tragic mulatto. Claiming Benjamin Franklin as her epitome from her experience as a suburban domestic, Lutie faces challenges directly connected to cyclic violence and poverty. From the beginning of the novel Petry subtly shows the overpowering omnipresence surveillance and spectatorship. The surveillance and spectatorship that Lutie experiences shows how it was used to control her movements physically, mentally and socioeconomically.

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

In the reading, Jones explores the relationship between class, race, and gender. She states that African Americans, in general, are oppressed, however, black women

Richard Wright’s “Native Son” Bigger shows us the short end of the stick of how it feels to be seen as a second-class citizen for being black. His speech talking about how he feels like a prisoner in this world just because he is black. (Wright P.17) This prison pain of Bigger in Wright’s novel shows how the negative effects of fear and discrimination affect minorities in our society. This discrimination just for existence is mirrored in the “Diary of Anne Frank” and “The Color of Water”. In the Diary of Anne Frank, spends two years of her life in an attic with her family and other Jewish people, hiding from the government trying to capture them just because they are Jewish. In “The Color of Water” Ruth McBride describes how the KKK was a huge part of her hometown. That whenever a car full of white hoods drove past, any African Americans in the store would run home, Ruth did the same thing, knowing her family was also in danger. (McBride P.58)

Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946) is a commentary on the social injustices that confronted the protagonist Lutie Johnson. Lutie is a single African American mother who lives in segregated America during the 1940’s. Throughout the novel, we see that during this time period Lutie is confronted by racism, sexism, and classism on a daily basis while in her pursuit of the American Dream for herself and her son Bub. Lutie is convinced that if she follows the example of Benjamin Franklin, by working hard and saving wisely, she will be able to achieve the dream of being financially independent and therefore be able to move out from the Street in which she is confined to. Benjamin Franklin is embodied in the text through the character Junto. It is Junto that is supposed to get Lutie closer towards her dream. However, Junto, through his secret manipulations tries to possess Lutie sexually, ultimately leading Lutie towards her path of destruction and she ends up committing the murder of Junto’s henchman, Boots. Junto represents the writer Petry’s deep disillusionment with this cultural myth of the so-called American dream. In Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), The protagonist Bigger Thomas, is

To begin with is the content. The authors of both literary works are women who have tried to act as the mirror of the society as they are able to recognize the plights of African women in the hands of the white man. Women compared to men have suffered a lot of racism, prejudice and rejection and nobody seem to come to their rescue (O'Brien, 2001). For example, in Smith's "what it's like to be a black American" portrays a vivid picture of how the young girl seem to be struggling inwardly so as to be accepted wholly from her dressing code to her physical appearance; "First of all, it's being 9 years old and feeling like you're not finished."- A sign of dissatisfaction with the physical look. This is because she feels that she

On a cool October night in South Carolina, Susan Smith strapped her two sons to the

In her novel The Street, Ann Petry develops her theme about the disparity between the American dream and the reality of living in America as a black woman. Petry uses mood and characterization to reveal her disillusionment about the American dream as well as her central theme that it is unattainable and impractical, especially for black women. The sinister mood of the novel is created by literary devices such as personification and imagery. Petry personifies the wind by describing how it “rattled the tops of garbage cans [and] sucked window shades out through the top of opened windows” (1).

The world has been characterized with inferiority and superiority complexes with every individual seeking to be superior over the other. John Hope Franklin presents this situation elaborately in the book “The Train from Hate.” The author was born in 1915 in the town of Oklahoma. As a young African American, Franklin experienced the first cases of early discrimination in the Midwest state. It is upon these experiences that Franklin develops his pieces of literature such as From Slavery to Freedom and A history of African Americans among others. John Hope Franklin is considered more than just a literature author; he was a public figure. In the course of his lifetime, Franklin served as a leader in the National Association for Advancement of Colored people (NAACP) (John Hope Franklin Biography 1)

The Novel “Native Son” by Richard Wright was adapted into a film in 1986 and was directed by Jerrold Freeman. Focused on the main character, Bigger Thomas has lived life in poverty trying to make it in a world that has proven to him that they feel he is inferior because of the color of his skin. Plagued by fear, anger and shame, Bigger was in a fierce fight within himself to fit in without exploding. The purpose of this essay is to examine Richard Wright’s adaptation of Native Son and to discuss how Bigger is guilty through relation of the cause and effect to racism, fear and psychological stress from those forces.

When analyzing Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright’s protagonist in the novel Native Son, one must take into consideration the development of his characterization. Being a poor twenty-year-old Black man in the south side of Chicago living with his family in a cramped one- bedroom apartment in the 1930’s, the odds of him prospering in life were not in his favor. Filled with oppression, violence, and tragedy, Bigger Thomas’ life was doomed from the moment he was born. Through the novel, Bigger divulges his own dreams to provide for his family and to be anything but a “nobody.” Although Bigger struggled to fight through obstacles to pursue his dreams for the future, his chase for a better life came to an abrupt

One significant theme that is present throughout the story is the one of unequal rights for African Americans. One instance of social injustice is described in the very