{"id":873,"date":"2023-09-10T13:39:41","date_gmt":"2023-09-10T17:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/?p=873"},"modified":"2023-09-10T13:40:21","modified_gmt":"2023-09-10T17:40:21","slug":"fate-or-consequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/2023\/09\/10\/fate-or-consequence\/","title":{"rendered":"Fate or Consequence\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Book Three of Native Son<\/em> by Richard Wright, titled \u201cFate\u201d, 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 \u201cFate\u201d 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\u2019s character plays into the white saviorism trope along with Jan and Mary\u2019s characters and his relation to solidarity becomes clear when he talks about his place in society as a Jewish person. Max\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s hard to analyze this novel and establish some sort of meaning to it because everything is so hard to justify. It\u2019s hard to give Bigger\u2019s life any meaning because his behavior was so extreme that one cannot just say he\u2019s 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, \u201cBigger\u2019s black face rested in his hands and he did not move\u201d (Wright 285). Wright wants the reader to have a negative connotation of the word \u201cblack\u201d. What\u2019s 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\u2019s hard to make sense of this novel just as it is hard to make sense of Bigger\u2019s character. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book Three of Native Son by Richard Wright, titled \u201cFate\u201d, 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 \u201cFate\u201d tries to convince the reader that … Continue reading Fate or Consequence\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4684,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[471414],"class_list":["post-873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-native-son"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873","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\/4684"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=873"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":876,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/873\/revisions\/876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/jamesbaldwin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}