Native Son Essay

Native Americans, or Indians, as they were mistakenly called, have been the “pathetic footnotes to the main course of American history” (Axtell 981). But James Axtell, the author of Colonial America without the Indians: Counterfactual Reflections, would beg to differ. He says that instead, Indians played a key role in making America great. James Murray gives another term to describe America’s greatness: America’s “exceptionalism.” Throughout his article Axtell makes many points as to why Indians played a vital role in “American Exceptionalism”. He even says that America wouldn’t have been colonized nearly as soon if the Indians were gone, because Columbus would know he was not in the Indies and move on. So because they simply existed in the first place, Axtell says they were significant in the history of our country. Furthermore, he says Indians specifically played a vital role in the exceptionality of America’s early economy, culture, and historical events and places.

Many times in novels, authors will use conflicts to strengthen the plot and to give more depth to the story that they are penning. There are four main plot conflicts that authors have to choose from: man versus nature, man versus society, man versus man, and finally, man versus self. Authors, many times, will use only one or two of these conflicts but in the novel, Native Son, all four conflicts are used to some extent. In this novel, Richard Wright, does a superb job of meticulously blending all four conflicts together to form a well-rounded novel about a black man in 1920 's Chicago.

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, the book is split into three books. The first 2 books focus mainly on the suspense and tensions rising within Bigger’s life and finally in the last book he dies. The dramatic conflict of Native Son takes place chiefly within the mind of Bigger Thomas, who lives in a world of whites, blacks , or reds. To Bigger all of life is conflict and issues that is defined by the color of your skin with the whites being higher up. The tensions within the book can be comparable to fire and ice as each element possess traits which can be seen as metaphors within the novel Native son by Richard Wright and his essay of “How Bigger was Born”.

People have been living in the Americas for thousands of years. Only fairly recently, the past few hundred years, have foreigners begun to arrive and drastically disrupt the way of life of the aboriginal population. The situation has become so severe that a population that was one believed to be numbered in the millions, was at one point reduced to as few as 220,000 in 1910, and entire tribes have been either irretrievably warped or have disappeared altogether. While Native American Indians have almost completely recovered population-wise, they will never catch up to the rest of the world, and their culture can never fully recuperate. At the time the United States was settled by Europeans, it was abundantly populated by dozens of

Richard Wright, wrote the fictional novel Native Son, using three intellectual forces, which include: Naturalism, Existentialism, and Communism. He uses these forces, along with racist ideology, to shape the life of a young black male, Bigger, living in the ‘Black Belt’ of Chicago in the 1940’s. Wright refers to the ‘Black Belt,’ as a ‘black world’ where violence is directed towards other American Americans, and warns that this violence will be aimed at white people. Bigger, is used to depict the criminal actions that come along with living in racial confinement under the fear of white people during this time.

Wright uses Bigger’s psychological corruption to send a message to the reader. It offers a new view on the underlying effects of racism on the black community of the time period. Wright creates Bigger from the diversity he saw throughout American society. “I made the discovery that Bigger Thomas was not black all the time; he was white, too, and there were literally millions of him, everywhere... I became conscious, at first dimly, and then later on with increasing clarity and conviction, of a vast, muddied pool of human life in America. It was as though I had put on a pair of spectacles whose power was that of an x-ray enabling me to see deeper into the lives of men. Whenever I picked up a newspaper, I 'd no longer feel that I was reading of the doings of whites alone (Negroes are rarely mentioned in the press unless they 've

Millions of African Americans went to cities like Chicago during the Great Migration like Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright 's novel Native Son. African Americans often faced harsh living conditions and racism. African Americans such as Bigger Thomas had the ideal “American Dream”, but could not

The story of Native Son by Richard Wright is one of the greatest pieces of literature which functioned as a massive wake-up call for the American public. According to Irving Howe, when "[t]he day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever." Native Son was written at a time when blacks were stereotyped as brutal and uncivilized. Wright depicts his community’s suffering, poverty and denial of rightful recognition in his works. Wright’s Native Son not only represents history with sociopolitical factors, but also has excellent literary value.

“Notes of a Native Son” follows the narrator and author, James Baldwin, from the past to the present as he reflects on his father’s and his relationship, while he tries to understand him from a more mature and forgiving perspective. James’s father has always been bitter and emotionally distant as long as he can remember, due to being born into slavery. However, James also inherits this mutual hatred towards the white society in America, by his father instilling his “bitter warnings” into him, but James later understood that his father only had his best interest in mind and felt a subtle sense guilt for having anger and resentment towards his father. “The Gift” depicts a story of the narrator as a child getting a splinter taken out of his hand by his father, and later inherits partial character from his father in a sense, as he remembers and emulates him, while the author takes a splinter out of his wife’s hand. Although, he doesn’t remember all the details of this ordinary setting, he recalls his father’s “tenderness” and “flames of discipline”. James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” and Li-Young Lee’s “The Gift” both bridge past and present memories that illuminate the

Bigger wants to break through that blindness, to discover something of worth in himself, thinking that "all one had to do was be bold, do something nobody ever thought of. The whole things came to him in the form of a powerful and simple feeling; there was in everyone a great hunger to believe that made them blind, and if he could see while others were blind, then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it" (p.120). Just as Bigger later hides himself amidst the catacombs of the old buildings, many people hide themselves deep within their minds in order to bear the ordeal of life and the oppression of an uncaring society. But their blindness allows them something that Bigger cannot achieve: it allows these people to meld into the society that is the city, while Bigger must stand at the outside of that community alternately marvelling and hating the compromises of those within.

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

In the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx states clearly that history is a series of class struggles over the means of production. Whoever controls the means of production also controls society and is able to force their set of ideas and beliefs onto the lower class. The present dominant class ideology is, as it has been since the writing of the United States Constitution, the ideology of the upper-class, Anglo-Saxon male. Obviously, when the framers spoke of equality for all, they meant for all land-owning white men. The words of the Declaration of Independence, also written by upper-class, Anglo-American males, are clear: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are rights necessary to each human

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).

In Native Son, Bigger, the main character, and his family are being over priced for a rundown, one-bedroom flat unsuitable to live in because of their race. Mr. Dalton, Bigger 's boss, owns the company that sold the Thomas 's their flat. The Thomas family along with a lot of other Africans in Chicago at the time, were forced to live in south side

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.