{"id":62,"date":"2021-02-21T16:25:25","date_gmt":"2021-02-21T21:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/?p=62"},"modified":"2021-02-21T16:39:54","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T21:39:54","slug":"doomed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/2021\/02\/21\/doomed\/","title":{"rendered":"Doomed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The sense of fatality that pervades Native Son<\/em> interested me the most in these last two books. Like in an ancient Greek tragedy, this novel is defined by the looming sense of a determined doom. The first oracle of this doom, for Bigger, is his mother; for the reader, the foreshadowing of the rat scene; and for the white characters, the irony of the furnace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bigger tells his mom to \u201c \u2018stop prophesying\u2019 \u201d after she warns him that someday, he will, overwhelmed by regret, \u201c \u2018set down and cry<\/em>\u2019 \u201d(9). Here Bigger does not offer a correction or attempt to see a different path. He simply asks his mom to stop espousing his fate. It is also interesting to note that the first direct depiction of Bigger\u2019s fate mentions a weak, \u2018hysteric\u2019 regret. It seems, then, that Bigger is doomed to a fate, not of death, but of emasculation. Perhaps, Wright is attempting to say that there is no difference between death and emasculation? In a patriarchal white supremacy that deals in power, an independent and virile masculinity does provide a certain distance from one\u2019s own pain. This interaction, combined with the line only a page earlier, where Bigger\u2019s mother says \u201c \u2018sometimes I wonder why I birthed you,\u2019 \u201d connects the female presence in the book with the main character\u2019s awareness of his damned fate (8). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, the incident with the rat triggers an awareness of a fatalistic tone for the reader. The rat is heard before it is seen as \u201ca light tapping in the thinly plastered walls of the room\u201d (4). Before it is identified, the rat is a nefarious disturbance that looms in the very structure where one is supposed to feel the safest: one\u2019s home. The first drama of the book, where Bigger kills this intrusive rat that has infiltrated their home and then uses its death to terrify Vera, embraces a sense of invasion and fatalism head on, then proceeds to make a mockery of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sense of an ever present doom also extends beyond the novel’s Black characters, though. It resides in the twisted irony surrounding the investigation of Mary\u2019s death, too. The disposal site of Mary\u2019s body is a character in the investigation. As the investigation flounders, \u201cthe crimson luster of the fire gleamed on the white men\u2019s faces\u201d (196). In this image, as well as in the smoke scene, the irony makes a joke out of the white men\u2019s search. The literal doom of Mary\u2019s tragic demise burns onto their faces. It is an imminent and tragic discovery, but it is also a twisted joke. No character in Wright\u2019s world seems exempt from the brutality of his fatalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sense of fatality that pervades Native Son interested me the most in these last two books. Like in an ancient Greek tragedy, this novel is defined by the looming sense of a determined doom. The first oracle of this doom, for Bigger, is his mother; for the reader, the foreshadowing of the rat scene; … Continue reading Doomed<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3917,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[471414],"tags":[472695,474085],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-native-son","tag-bigger","tag-fatalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3917"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}