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Native Son Blindness

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Blindness is the loss of sight, and it can be temporary or permanent, but is it more complex than we know. Native Son was written by Richard Wright. It tells a story about a twenty-year-old man named Bigger Thomas, who is uneducated and black. He and his family lived in a one-room apartment on Chicago’s South Side during the 20th century. He was given the opportunity to work for a wealthy, white family called the Daltons. However, on his first day, he ended up murdering their only daughter, Mary and later his girlfriend, Bessie. Bigger was eventually caught by the police and Max was his lawyer for the case. In the end, the court final decision was giving him a death sentence. Throughout Native Son, Wright revealed that blindness affects everyone …show more content…

Gus and Bigger were playing a game called playing white. It was an acting game in which they imitate white folks. Gus was not really into the game as Bigger was. They acted as Mr. J.P. Morgan, the President of United States, Secretary, and General. Some of the words they said were “I heard it in movies. ‘I want you to sell twenty thousand shares of U.S. Steel in the market this morning,’ ‘Well, you see, the niggers are raising sand all over the country,’ Bigger said,... ‘We’ve got to do something with these black folks.”(Wright, 18-19) This shows that the main character, Bigger, saw the white men as people with power just like the ones in the movies. The characters they chose to play were rich, powerful, and affiliated with the government. In Bigger’s mind, he did not think he was blind instead he believed in everything he saw and heard. It surprising that Bigger incorporate the ideas of the blacks in the game but in a bad way. This reveals continued to prove the blindness Bigger have. However, towards the ending of the story, he admits that he was blind in certain ways but it could not be changed. Therefore, Bigger’s blindness was the effect of thinking that all whites act the same way and it is because of this thought that led to his murder of Mary

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