Society Expectations In Richard Wright's 'Native Son'

In the film “Native Son” by Richard Wright, Bigger Thomas is the main character of this film. In the begging Bigger had to kill a rat, he lived with just is sisters and mother meaning he had no father figure in his life. Bigger went straight to the streets with his friends to plan a robbery on the Bum’s store. They felt like since the owner was a white male they needed to bring guns; the plan fell threw. Bigger gets a job offer from the Daltons family, he goes to watch a movie about the daughter Mary Dalton. Leads to Bigger finding out that Mary is dating a communist and that herself is rebelling against her family. After the movie he met up with his friends again and when one of them are late Bigger gets full of anger bringing out a knife of his friend. After the argument with his friends Bigger goes

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.

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 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”.

Mary was having a conversation with Bigger and asked him several questions. She wants to help out the African American. After she left the car for a moment, a thought occurs to Bigger. It was “The hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do”(Wright, 65). In this quote, Wright conveyed how Bigger was destined to never be equal to the whites or have the same power. He categorized Mary as “a part of the world” which indicates the existence of segregation in society and how his life is influenced by it. People from that part of the world may tell him something but in his mind, it seems like an order. Wright used the phrase “hard fact” to symbolize that it is the truth so it cannot be changed. In Bigger’s world, it is a reality that does not want to accept. Racial discrimination put them on a different standard from birth, which contributes to the fact that Bigger is unable to have control over his

Today racism is seen all around the world within different religions, beliefs and backgrounds. However, in the early nineteen hundreds, specifically the 1920s to the 1930s racism was prevalent between the White and Blacks. African-Americans were sold as slaves, beaten, murdered and lynched as a result of Caucasians believing that they were the superior race. Toni Morrison's novels, Sula, shares the story of Sula Peace and Nel Wright’s friendship, the challenges they are faced with and the impact of social implications. Comparably, in Richard Wright’s Native Son, follows the life and trial of twenty year old African-American Bigger Thomas who kills a white woman, providing insight into what was expected from and thought about African-Americans. In Sula, Toni Morrison focuses not only on racism between opposing backgrounds and how it influences social implications, but shows that racism does not exist through segregation alone but within the same community. Richard Wright's Native Son, explores how the segregation and oppression between the black and white community influence violence and social expectations. Through the use of juxtaposition and symbolism both authors highlight the implications racist attitudes have on the characters during the time period in which the novels are set.

The obliviousness of white society is most clearly demonstrated by “You know, Bigger, I’ve long wanted to go into these houses, and just see how your people live. You know what I mean? I’ve been to England, France, and Mexico, but I don’t know how people live ten blocks from me. We know so little about each other. I just want to see. I want to know these people. Never in my life have I been inside of a negro home. Yet they must live like we live. They’re human. There are twelve million of them. They live in our country. In the same city with us.” (Wright 70). This excerpt from the book came from one of the dialogues of Mary, the wealthy white girl that Bigger was “forced” to murder because of her intoxication. Mary was a white woman who had not experienced the squalor of black society. As a result, she thinks relatively highly of black society in that she thinks that they live in a similar manner as whites. This adds to the theme of racism because it shows that whites made no effort to learn about how badly the blacks were being oppressed and that whites only saw blacks as inferiors who deserved to be treated like they do because of the immoral actions of a few blacks.

Moreover, books with literary value that teach readers something worth knowing as its message sometimes changes who they are as a person. By using well developed characters, setting, and plot with important symbols, the author usually makes readers have deep reflections on humanity, life, and morals. For example, in Native Son, Richard Wright tries to shed light on the issue of racism and its adverse effects on people by utilizing literary devices such as the setting of Chicago, the characterization of Bigger Thomas, and the symbolism of blindness. By juxtaposing Bigger’s and Dalton’s house, both in Chicago and yet divided by the “Black Belt”, he underlines the segregation of American society. Wright also develops symbols of blindness to give an idea that both the black and white societies are

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

  In Native Son, Wright employs Naturalistic ideology and imagery, creating the character of Bigger Thomas, who seems to be composed of a mass of disruptive emotions rather than a rational mind joined by a soul. This concept introduces the possibility that racism is not the only message of the novel, that perhaps every person would feel as isolated and alone as Bigger does were he trapped in such a vicious cycle of violence and oppression. Bigger strives to find a place for himself, but the blindness he encounters in those around him and the bleak harshness of the Naturalistic society that Wright presents the reader with close him out as effectively as if they had shut a door in his

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

Native Son is a fictional book written by Richard Wright and was published in 1940. To truly understand the meaning of a book, I believe it’s important to understand the author. Upon further research, Richard Wright was a black author with a fascinating past. He was born into extreme poverty in the southern state of Mississippi. At one brief point in his life, he was forced to stay in an orphanage and he even dropped out of high school. One of the most fascinating pieces of information that I learned about Richard Wright was that he was apart of the communist party before he began to write novels. Wright even wrote articles and stories for communist magazines. The book that I read, Native Son, was written with the help of the Guggenheim

Throughout my study of racism in America, violence, gender, class, and more have all been brought to the forefront of discussions of racial oppression. Human sexuality is often subverted in these conversations, although it intersects with all of these forms of racism. African Americans are often subject to sexual stereotyping and objectification which causes them to become rigidly policed by both society and themselves (Gonzales and Rolison 715). Since sexuality presents itself as a significant way in which African Americans are oppressed, sexual persecution presents itself as a theme in many prominent pieces of African American literature. Specifically, these themes present themselves in Iceberg Slim’s autobiography Pimp and Richard Wright’s novel Native Son. Despite the fact that Iceberg Slim’s popular underground autobiography and Richard Wright’s fictional sociological commentary appear to be on separate ends of the African American literary spectrum, both works demonstrate how Black sexuality is policed, objectified and commodified in mid 20th century America. Studies performed by Alicia M. Gonzales and Gary Rolison for their article Social Oppression and Attitudes towards Sexual Practices prove that African Americans receive less sexual freedom in contemporary America, and analysis of Native Son and Pimp will exhibit the ways in which this, sexual oppression, presents itself in societal experiences, and how African Americans are blocked in attempts to escape this

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 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.