Richard Wright 's Native Son

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

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

Thomas was brought up in poverty conditions. He and his siblings stayed in a one bedroom shack. Thomas grew up speaking creole a dialect spoke by African Americans who lives by the coast. In 1964 his grandfather withdrew him from an all black religious high school and was transferred to an all white catholic boarding school. He was faced with lots of racism and disrespect but didn’t let that phase him. He was a star player on the school football team. He all so maintained good grades while in school. Following

I would argue, however, that Bigger always detested whites treating him like a nobody and after accidentally killing Mary Dalton, he began being more open about he he feels since he had little to lose. Anyway, Bryant’s main argument is that the white world does not see Bigger, and this is one of Bigger’s biggest fears. Indeed, when they accuse him of rape, this takes away the subjectivity that would have been associated with him had he simply been called a murderer. In addition to making Bigger seem less than human by labeling him as a rapist, the authorities do not think that Bigger is intelligent enough to carry out a murder as complex as Mary Dalton’s. All this goes to show that Bigger is a symbol that whites have used as an excuse to discriminate against Blacks, and who Bigger is as a person is not something that really matters. The reason Bigger has negative feelings towards all Whites for the majority of the book is because they only see his skin color.

Based in the 1930’s, the protagonist Bigger Thomas is a twenty year old man living in Chicago with his family in poverty. He is severely damaged by his fear, anger, frustration and shame. He is damaged so much that his actions often resulted in foolish acts. The story is mainly from Bigger’s prospective and it shows how he had to hide his fears through a tough exterior. A product of his environment, Bigger was involved in illegal activity with his friends and harming his own Black people. Due to his own issues, even his illegal activity in his own community backfires on him as he sabotages a robbery with his friends he was involved with. He ends up working for the Daltons, a family taking advantage of the poor Black people in Chicago’s South side, as a chauffeur. Here he meets Mary and Jan who are all for social justice but still have

In the beginning, when Bigger started working for the Dalton’s, he had to drive Mary Dalton, the daughter, to the University of Chicago. However, she wanted him to pick up her boyfriend, Jan, and head to a restaurant. When Bigger was in the car with Jan and Mary, “he was very conscious of his black skin...Jan and men like him” made Bigger feel insecure of who he was. (Wright 67) Even though Jan and Mary did not say anything that would insult his race, the presence of white people made him self-conscious. Being

This gap between what Bigger understands about himself and what the narrative voice can comprehend creates dramatic irony, especially when Bigger is confronted with Jan and Mary’s inexplicably friendly behavior. Wright’s descriptions of Jan and Mary make their good intentions clear to all but Bigger, and therefore sets up an unequal relationship between Bigger and the reader. He is now at the mercy not only of his own impulses, his employer’s wishes, and the law of white society, but also of Wright and his audience. The vertical consciousness that allows us to see so clearly what Bigger cannot, supports the deterministic trap that Wright has set for him. His environment has saddled him with unsatisfied urges, and now Wright has made him the victim of chance. In Mary’s claim that she wants to see how black people live in Chicago, Bigger experiences the “deep sense of exclusion” that Wright describes in How Bigger Was Born (518). Then, in seeing Mary’s white robed mother at her bedroom door, he encounters the corresponding “feeling of looking at things with a painful and unwarrantable nakedness,” the understanding of his total vulnerability, which forces him to kill Mary (518). His fate is sealed. With this dramatic irony, produced by a kind of vertical consciousness, Wright has proven to what extent the black man’s agency, his interiority, is “warped” by external forces and placed in

to afford food and housing, led to resentment between the two social classes. In the novel, the social classes were divided by who lived on what side of the city line. The real estate companies would only rent run down apartments to blacks on their side of the line, ironically at higher rates. Towards the end of the novel, Bigger’s lawyer, Max states how “‘You rent to Negroes in the Black Belt and you refuse to rent to them elsewhere” when speaking in front of the courtroom, mentioning how Mr. Dalton hurts the black community. As Bigger Thomas searched around his family’s small one room apartment, divided by curtains he “then darted to a curtain and swept it aside and grabbed two heavy iron skillets from a wall above a gas stove” in search

Bigger is oppressed by racism in the 1930s. In the 1930s the color of a person’s skin defined them. Bigger being a black male defines him as a lesser man than a white man. People of color are reduced to live in the South Side of Chicago. Bigger, his mom, and two siblings live in a dirty

In Richard Wright’s book, Native Son he says “… A complex struggle for life going on in my country…the Southern Scheme of oppression…a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine.” After declaring independence from Great Britain, America has been known to be a beacon of hope around the world, and a nation that welcomes everyone in the search of freedom, yet, the nation constantly finds itself entangled in a fundamentally broken system, where racial and migratory issues plague the United States threatening its origin as a sovereign state. However the United States has not lived up to such standard, and has failed to live up to their promise in the Pledge of Allegiance of “...liberty and justice for

In the morning, Mrs. Dalton wonders about Mary’s whereabouts and why her trunk is only half filled with clothes if she’s leaving for Detroit. Bigger mentions that Mary was really with Jan the night before, not at the university. Mrs. Dalton sends him home for the rest of the day, but he goes and sees Bessie, his girlfriend. He forces her to take part in faking a ransom note for Mary’s disappearance, but she suspects that Bigger had something to do with it. Later on, Bigger returns to the Dalton house to find that Mr. Dalton has hired Britten, a private detective. Bigger is questioned and he answers in a way that raises suspicion towards Jan. Later, Bigger slips the ransom note under the door. Mr. Dalton immediately alerts Britten, and with him, reporters follow back to the Dalton house. In the basement, a reporter tends to the furnace when Bigger fills the room with smoke and discovers human bone and an earring. Bigger is now on the run and brings Bessie with him so she doesn’t snitch. Bigger later rapes and kills her, dumping her body over the ledge of a

She tells Bigger, “I think I can trust you” (Wright 64) in order to toy with his emotions and disobey his boss’ orders as Bigger, Mary, and Mary’s communist boyfriend Jan Erlone take the car out for a night in the loop. After a rousing evening on the town filled with booze and conversations about communism that left Bigger offended and ashamed to be black, it became Bigger’s duty to make sure that Mary was placed safely in her bed after being too intoxicated to stand on her own. Because Bigger strives to obey his boss, he feels inclined to personally place Mary in her own room in order to avoid trouble. This shows that Bigger Thomas took Mary to her bedroom with no intention of causing any problems in his new workplace reminding the reader that Bigger is not an evil human being, just a product of his environment. After being in Mary’s bedroom, Bigger decided to overstay his welcome due to his curious arousal with white women. To Bigger’s surprise, “a hysterical terror seized him” (Wright 85) as Mrs. Dalton makes an appearance in Mary’s bedroom to check on her daughter. Bigger automatically assumed that if he was caught in Mary Dalton’s bedroom at an odd hour of the night he would be immediately fired and accused of raping a white woman that could ruin his already tragic life forever. Due to her blindness, Bigger was not seen immediately, but he realized if Mary kept mumbling, Mrs. Dalton would make her way

Race plays a major role in the choices that Bigger makes because in this time period majority of the white people hate Blacks. Bigger is an African American, he’s poor, and unemployed. Bigger’s mom has a job but it’s not one that can support a family of 4. The apartment that Bigger and his family lives in is described as small and dirty. All of those characteristics play a role in Bigger’s life because all he wanted was more. More to live for. Bigger felt trapped and he let the fear of not having money or happiness ruin his life.

Bigger Thomas live with his brother, sister and mother in a small room. Two beds are occupied most of the space.A bed two brothers, both mother and daughter in a bed. Dress up every morning, the mother and daughter to get up, have to let the two boys first turned away. With plenty of space to describe how he then kill a mouse, lifelike. From the process of describing kill rats, reflects the black poor at that time, also reflect in the hard living environment to create the cruel his character. The author through to their living environment, to express the black of the living environment of the poor. What causes the one brutal character. At that time, blacks are belongs to the oppressed marginalized people. Their gentle and obedient. For white

In Richard Wright’s Native Son, Bigger Thomas attempts to gain power over his environment through violence whenever he is in a position to do so.