Native Son : Who Made Bigger Thomas?

Bigger Thomas uses deception to cover the crime for his personal safety. He knows that the white people of Chicago will kill him if they know he killed a white girl. Throughout his deceit, Bigger feels the white world

Wright implies, suggest, and even says that Bigger Thomas is an embodiment of the black revolt against the injustices of white caste society and that this revolt often takes the form of crime against this same white society. Borne into a white society, hostile and indifferent, Bigger becomes the total embodiment of that city hatreds and prejudice against the black man.

Bigger Thomas is a fictional, 20 year old, Negro male living in Chicago during the Great Depression. This character, created by Richard Wright in Native Son, became assigned with the job of giving insight to the life of a black American male during the 1930s. Bigger lived a life in which he made decisions on impulse, fueled by his emotions. No action Bigger completed became carried out with proper thought and rationality, thus, ultimately ending in his imprisonment and, furthermore, his death. Through the telling of Bigger’s life, Wright shows what influences created a man such as Bigger. In doing this, Wright proves that Bigger Thomas cannot exist as more than a symbol used to highlight the oppression the black race faced post Civil War.

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.

The book takes place during the Great Depression, and at this time, African Americans are given less job opportunities. Therefore, they don’t have a lot of jobs to do, have less money, and this puts pressure on them to take any job they can in order to raise their families. In Bigger’s situation, he does not show that he loves his family, but really, he is trying to cover up his helpless emotions because he wants to help them,and give them better living conditions, but he knows that it would not be possible for him to do it all by himself. This makes him feel sad, and he does not want to show his family that he is not

Bigger Thomas, a young African American male, Twenty years old; vicious, vile and mean; he hates himself and all human society, especially that part of society which he attributes to making him a monster. Bigger Thomas is in rebellion on what he views as the white caste system; his crime is targeted at white society and the people that he views as being his oppressors. Bigger has the choice of taking on three roles, he can take on the role passivity designed for him by the southern whites and resolve his personal conflicts through the emotional catharsis of religion; or he can strive for and establish his own middle class society and thereby consciously or unconsciously become the white man's accomplice in oppression;

When Bigger Thomas brings Mary Dalton home after a night out, he is ever so careful with her, in hopes of not disturbing the rest of the house. He doesn’t want Mary, or even himself to get in trouble, because of Mary’s drunkenness. Mary, indifferent than the white community, “responded to him as if he were human, as if he lived in the same world as she “(Wright 65). Because Bigger felt a little more comfortable around Mary, than he did with her father, he acted in a way that later put him to shame. Mrs. Dalton walks into the bedroom where Bigger and Mary were, which frightens him, making him commit the crime of killing Mary. Bigger thought that he would be caught, so he covers Mary’s face to keep her quiet. Mrs. Dalton’s blindness causes her to not physically see Bigger or Mary, or even the crime that Bigger does. The blindness causes Bigger to both commit a violent act, and get away with it for a short period of time. The physical blindness correlates with the idea that whites do not see blacks as

If Bigger had the same advantages as a white man like Mr. Dalton his outlook on life could have been different. To Bigger living a life without freedom was

Wright suggests that throughout book one and two that the black rat in the tenements symbolizes Bigger and when he visits the Daltons house there is a white cat that symbolize white people watching over Bigger the rat. The black rat always fearful of the white cat because the cat is more powerful and will kill the rat at anytime. Bigger is scared of what will happen to him in this world and the nature of man, because he was most terrified of, more than anything in the world, was the unavoidable certainty of his future. For this, he dreaded his own fate: the inevitable outcome of a life constrained by social forces determined by a billowing and intangible oppressor. Bigger feared that as a young black male living on Chicago’s South Side his life course was inalterable, always not knowing what will happen because he is the lower man in this society and always looks up to the white

While Mr. Dalton, owner of the controlling stock of the Dalton Real Estate company which owns the controlling stock of the South Side Real Estate company, claims to work towards the cause of colored people, he refuses to rent out houses to Negroes outside of the South Side. As a result, Bigger was born and raised under such constraints, and it is his worry that he will never be given the chance to succeed because the whites have confined him and his people. As mentioned earlier in the novel, Bigger expresses his interest towards aviation. However, it frustrates him that he will never get the chance to pursue his interest because in order to do so he would have to complete school with an aviation major, but the opportunity will never come to him because of his black skin. As a result, because Bigger isn't given the freedom to accomplish his goals, he cannot better himself.

Bigger would go around with Gus, Jack, and G.H., and do nothing good for the community. The friends would either violently play pool in the pool room, or go steal from some other black people, because they thought it was okay to steal from their own race. His friends never thought it was wrong for them to not have jobs and just lay around bumming money off their parents, so Bigger didn’t either. Bigger is a villain for never speaking up and telling his friends what was right and wrong. He went along with them and was just as much in on it as everybody else.

Based in Chicago in the 1930’s, twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas lives in rat infested poverty. He is uneducated, fresh out of reform school, and full of fear. Ahead of him is an overbearing and pressuring wall of white people: no one is seen as individuals

In fact, it was the white dominated society that actually had killed the real Bigger much earlier than his physical death. Thus, as Bakish points out, Bigger’s spiritual death predates his execution because “he is formally killed by the society that had been slowly murdering him all his life. (40). And it was white horror and the fear of his inferior race that compels him to hide his presence in Mary’s room on the arrival of Mrs. Dalton. Had Bigger been white instead of black, his fear would not have dominated him to such an extent. After Killing Mary, Bigger’s thinking is surrounded by the fear of his race as he thinks “he was a murderer, a Negro murderer, a black murderer. He has killed a white woman” (NS, 82). Bigger’s fatal experience reverberates

Although Bigger’s first dramatic crime was not actually a crime at all, it set him down a path of more fear and confusion of his own existence and purpose. He then became conformed to the stereotypes he had been avoiding all his life.What started as an accident result in him using multigenerational maladaptive behaviors which originated as survival strategies. Kennedy writes, “No American Negro exists who does not have a private Bigger living in the skull…and if you multiply him twelve million times, you have the psychology of the black people” (348). Bigger Thomas is a product of his society as is everyone else. America has made great strides in becoming a more inclusive country, but with the continuation of many prejudice acts one step forward is always a step

Bigger Thomas wakes up the next morning, after killing Mary Dalton, in his home. He is struck with fear and believes that he should go back to the Dalton’s home to see if Mary’s body has burned in the furnace.