Native Son By Right Essay, Research Paper

Bigger Thomas has been shaped by various forces. Forces that have changed the

life completely for Bigger Thomas. In Native Son, Bigger Thomas seems to be

composed of a mass of disruptive emotions rather than a rational mind joined by

a soul. 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 face. In the first book, Wright tells the reader

"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 — like water ebbing and flowing from the tug of a far-away, invisible

force" (p.31). Bigger is controlled by forces that he cannot tangibly

understand. Bigger’s many acts of violence are, in effect, a quest for a soul.

He desires an identity that is his alone. Both the white and the black

communities have robbed him of dignity, identity, and individuality. The human

side of the city is closed to him, and for the most part Bigger relates more to

the faceless mass of the buildings and the mute body of the city than to another

human being. His mother’s philosophy of suffering to wait for a later reward is

equally stagnating — to Bigger it appears that she is weak and will not fight

to live. Her religion is a blindness; but she needs to be blind in order to

survive, to fit into a society that would drive a "seeing" person mad.

All of the characters that Bigger says are blind are living in darkness because

the light is too painful. Bigger wants to break through that blindness, to

discover something of worth in himself, thinking that "all one had to do

was be bold, do something nobody ever thought of. The whole things came to him

in the form of a powerful and simple feeling; there was in everyone a great

hunger to believe that made them blind, and if he could see while others were

blind, then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it" (p.102).

Just as Bigger later hides himself amidst the catacombs of the old buildings,

many people hide themselves deep within their minds in order to bear the ordeal

of life and the oppression of an uncaring society. But their blindness allows

them something that Bigger cannot achieve: it allows these people to meld into

the society that is the city, while Bigger must stand at the outside of that

community alternately marvelling and hating the compromises of those within.

Bigger is alone; he is isolated from every facet of human affection. Max tells

the court that Bigger cannot kill because he himself is dead, and a person

without empathy or sympathy, without the deep, steadying love of family or faith

in anything. When he lashes out in violence it is in a way a search for what

hurt him; he hurts others because it is a way of hiding that he is hurt and

afraid.). If one considers life to be a period of growth and learning,

recognition of self-worth and of the worth of others, then Bigger has not been

given the chance to live. Book Three is called "Fate", and indeed

Bigger seems to be controlled his entire life by ambivalent outside forces who

could care less about him. He has been lied to until he believes the lies he

tells himself. He has no place in society. His own mother believes in him no

more than the billboard reading "you can’t win" that he sees each day

outside his apartment. He has grown up in an environment where enormous rats

fester in holes and water is a maybe situation, where meals are precarious and

money is almost nonexistent, and where he is told time and time again that he

has no worth, no dignity, no intelligence or creativity. Is it any wonder that

Bigger is violent? It seems more fantastic that all of the people around him are

not. When he says, upon reading the paper "No! Jan didn’t help me! He

didn’t have a damned thing to do with it! I — I did it!" (p.283) he is

clinging to the act of violence he performed as an affirmation of self. He is

isolated by a blind society, he is loved by no one, he has never been given a

chance to explore who and what he is. His attitude of "why care?" is

rather to be expected, predicted, than wondered over. He is not a good person,

he is not noble or true or brilliantly creative. But he has the capacity for all

of those things, and has not been given the chance to fulfill them. His crime of

violence is as much the crime of the people around him, who stifled his soul and

nourished the other, baser side of him that was the only way he had of

self-expression.