Author: pjenkins

“How Bigger Was Born” is Wright’s attempt to explain to the reader his motives for writing such a gruesome novel. It is hard to believe that the world he creates for Bigger is respectable. His childhood serves as the main factor into his perspective on the experience of black men in America. He claims that he knew several “Biggers” and the one in Native Son is an accumulation of the black men that he watched meet unfortunate endings. In trying to understand his reasons for writing Native Son, he fails to convince me that writing it was “an exciting, enthralling, and even a romantic experience” (461). He argues that black men being accused of rape is “a representative symbol of the Negro’s uncertain position in America” (455). I find this claim to be flawed because Bigger did rape Bessie and wasn’t even charged for rape in the novel. Further, he states that after writing Native Son he started another novel on the status of women in modern America. Wright’s focus on this aspect of the criminalization of black men is concerning, when he claims that he wrote the novel to free himself from a sense of shame and fear that comes from being black in America. In the end Bigger is not really freed from this sense of shame and hate. He buried it under the euphoria he experienced from murder. One of the most striking arguments he presents is that he “was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and Bigger in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless” (446). This comparison took me away from the Bigger portrayed in the novel as a person and led me to looking at Bigger as an idea apart from race; a dangerous one. He states, “The difference between Bigger’s tensity and the German variety is that Bigger’s, due to America’s educational restrictions on the bulk of her Negro population, is in a nascent state, not yet articulate. And the difference between Bigger’s longing for self-identification and the Russian principle of self-determination is that Bigger’s, due to the effects of American oppression, which has not allowed for the forming of deep ideas of solidarity among Negroes, is still in a state of individual anger and hatred. Here, I felt, was drama! Who will be the first to touch off these Bigger Thomases in America, white and black?” (447). How is the reader supposed to believe that Bigger is merely a product of his environment when his persona is based on extreme ideals. I am still trying to figure out where I stand with this book and “Everybody’s Protest Novel” brings a little clarity. Baldwin states, “For Bigger’s tragedy is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being subhuman and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth” (18). Further, “The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being…” (18). Native Son is a life-draining novel and reflects the depressing state of the war stricken world during the time it was written in. 

Book Three of Native Son by Richard Wright, titled “Fate”, attempts at humanizing Bigger Thomas by establishing his case as bigger, no pun intended, than his troubling psyche. Although the reader can predict what is going to happen to Bigger early on in the novel, the majority of “Fate” tries to convince the reader that somehow Bigger might escape his fate. The reader is forced to question if Bigger deserves the death penalty and his lawyer Max makes a pretty decent case for him to be saved. Max’s character plays into the white saviorism trope along with Jan and Mary’s characters and his relation to solidarity becomes clear when he talks about his place in society as a Jewish person. Max’s argument to the court on behalf of Bigger is probably the one clarity one will get from the novel. He tries to make sense of Bigger’s actions and turn the situation into an argument of the collective African American experience. I think that he knew that Bigger couldn’t be saved but he used the situation to make a case for social injustice in america. It’s pretty clear that Bigger is going to die though, no matter how convincing Max’s speech is. Although noble, how do you make sense of a disaster? It’s hard to analyze this novel and establish some sort of meaning to it because everything is so hard to justify. It’s hard to give Bigger’s life any meaning because his behavior was so extreme that one cannot just say he’s a product of his environment. It seems as though Wright wants the reader to hate Bigger from the way he writes about him. Throughout the novel Wright feels the need to remind us that Bigger is a poor black man who is going to live a poor black life and never amount to anything. For example, deep into the novel on page 285 it states, “Bigger’s black face rested in his hands and he did not move” (Wright 285). Wright wants the reader to have a negative connotation of the word “black”. What’s even worse about this book is that the ending establishes prison as fate for black men. Prison is often described as a place of familiarity for black men and this novel contributes to that stereotype. Max argues that prison will be a refuge for Bigger, which is a paradoxical concept. Max describes life in prison as literally giving Bigger a chance at a better life, but how much growth could occur when Bigger is portrayed as unsaveable? Death is the fate of all humans, but this depressing narrative connotes death with blackness. It’s hard to make sense of this novel just as it is hard to make sense of Bigger’s character. 

Richard Wright begins Native Son with the exploration of fear and what it can do to a person, more specifically a poor black man named Bigger. In Book One, titled “Fear”, Bigger proves the virtue, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Franklin D. Roosevelt). While this quote can be somewhat uninspiring in a world where poverty and racism reek, in the case of Bigger it has so much truth to it. It is quite unsettling to discover Bigger’s downfall as one progresses through “Fear”. For someone who is extremely self-aware, Bigger remains so helpless. The reader knows that Bigger’s self hatred contributes to many if not all of the poor decisions that he makes. On page 10 it states, “He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough” (Wright 10). This kind of anger or discontent with life that allows him to think that he will retaliate in a way that ends in death is scary, but it speaks to the way that men tend to handle their emotions. Bigger views the suppression of his feelings and violence as the only answer to his feelings of powerlessness, and he seems fine with this. Wright states, “These were the rhythms of his life: indifference and violence; periods of abstract brooding and periods of intense desire; moments of silence and moments of anger…He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them” (Wright 29). Further, when he is playing “white” with Gus, they mimic the way upper class white men speak to each other. Bigger makes reference to J.P. Morgan Chase and the President of the United States. Their game reveals how incompetent they feel in a society that would never allow them to succeed in the first place. Their mocking of white maleness reveals their desire for proximity to it. Bigger desires to fly a plane like white males do and continually states that “they” don’t allow “us” (being black men) to do anything (to make money or be something). The one chance Bigger gets to make some money ends in tragedy due to his fear of blackness and whiteness. Bigger’s attempt to escape the responsibility he claims he does not possess leads him to the death that he tried so hard to avoid. He commits desperate acts of violence as an attempt to cling onto some power over himself and his future. However, his avoidance of his consciousness does not aid him in escaping the fate that he manifested for himself.