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The use of symbolism in native son by Richard Wright
Discuss some of the noticeable character trait of bigger thomas in the novel "native son" by richard wright
Analysis of richard wright the black boy
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The life of Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's Native Son is not one that most can understand. It is stamped by ruthlessness, mistreatment, and a future that is not looked forward to. Richard Wright uses Bigger Thomas as a fundamental character in Native Son. Bigger is also the center focus of the story, was made to be a stereotype and an example of the impact of prejudice on the mental state of African American people living in Chicago during the 1940s. Coming from the background he came from Bigger really was more likely to fail than to be successful. Bigger was born into poverty, on the south side of Chicago, and being a black hurts him even more in such a racist environment. Richard Wright places Bigger in a stereotype role that white society see black men as Wright uses this role to show that this Bigger was not born this way, but it is a racist society that has made him this way. This can be seen because like most people Bigger wanted to be able to provide for his family, put them in a nice home, and he hated that he could not. He also wanted a career and in his case as a pilot. This is the reason Wright names his book “Native Son”, to show readers that Bigger was born and raised in the United States making him a Native Son of the United States. Being a native son Bigger is going to be greatly influence and effected by his environment and the ways of society which is the argument of his attorney that this is what society gets because they mistreated him put fear into him and this is the sum of their equation.
In the book Bigger and his friend Gus look up at the sky and see a plane. It leaves a sentence "USE SPEED GASOLINE"; they then talk about the speed at which planes can fly at. Bigger then states that if he had the op...
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...event that leads Bigger’s destiny to failure. Because Bigger knows if he gets discovered in her room he will be accused of trying to rape her and will jailed and very likely executed just because he is black. His only other choice was to do what he did, but unluckily he unintentionally kills Mary making his path to failure even greater. All of this happens because Bigger is afraid. Bigger faces fear all throughout the story and his fear comes from him feeling that white people are out to oppress him and he can not doing anything about it. Richard Wright uses Bigger in his story to show how society of that time period put fear into black society. Bigger’s fear is what takes him down the path of the dooms which eventually causes him to harm, his friends, other black people, and kill to young girls one being his girlfriend and the other the daughter of his employer.
... during this time. Problem involving the racial order in society caused many deaths not only in the book but in real life. Jane was free but lived as a slave her entire life. Jane tried to escape to the south but failed and work the same jobs as she did when she was a slave. Black people were not slaves but law anymore but they still lived in mental slavery, bound by the racial order. Black people suffered for many years after slavery and fought for civil rights just as Jane, Ned, and Jimmy “The One” did.
The theme that Native Son author Richard Wright puts in this story is that the white community makes Bigger act the way he does, that through the communities actions, Bigger does all the things he is accused of doing. The theme that I present is that Bigger only acts the way that he did because of the influences that the white community has had on him accepted by everyone. When Bigger gets the acceptance and love he has always wanted, he acts like he does not know what to do, because really, he does not. In Native Son, Bigger uses his instincts and acts like the white people around him have formed him to act. They way that he has been formed to act is to not trust anyone. Bigger gets the acceptance and love he wanted from Mary and Jan, but he still hates them and when they try to really get to know him, he ends up hurting them. He is scared of them simply because he has never experienced these feelings before, and it brings attention to him from himself and others. Once Bigger accidentally kills Mary, he feels for the first time in his life that he is a person and that he has done something that somebody will recognize, but unfortunately it is murder. When Mrs. Dalton walks in and is about to tell Mary good night, Bigger becomes scared stiff with fear that he will be caught committing a crime, let alone rape. If Mrs. Dalton finds out he is in there he will be caught so he tries to cover it up and accidentally kills Mary. The police ask why he did not just tell Mrs. Dalton that he was in the room, Bigger replies and says he was filled with so much fear that he did not know what else to do and that he did not mean to kill Mary. He was so scared of getting caught or doing something wrong that he just tried to cover it up. This is one of the things that white people have been teaching him since he can remember. The white people have been teaching him to just cover things up by how the whites act to the blacks. If a white man does something bad to a black man the white man just covers it up a little and everything goes back to normal.
Throughout the history of writing, cats have symbolized craftiness, misfortune, deceit and death. Richard Wright creates no exception to this reputation in his novel Native Son. Bigger Thomas, a young, depressed black man, is placed in an awkward position when he is interviewed for a job with the Daltons, a wealthy white family. The Dalton's unnamed white cat, gazes at Bigger, symbolizing initially white society. This gazing causes Bigger to feel angry and awkward so that is comes to assume a far more critical symbolic level on the night of Mary Dalton's murder. His feelings lead him to express himself overtly in violence, specifically Bigger's killing of Mary. In effect, the Dalton's cat kills Mary.
They deal with rat infestations, eviction, and poverty day by day. As the story goes on, Bigger’s mother constantly nags him about getting a job, and providing for his family. This causes Bigger to hate his family and hate his life because of the fact that they are so poor, and he can’t do anything to help them.
In the novel Native Son by Richard Wright, the final plea of Mr. Max regarding the trial of Bigger Thomas is very important as it encompasses the main theme of oppression and its importance to the United States on a monumental scale. Mr. Max analyzes the life of Bigger Thomas in the way the author intends it to be seen, as a symbol of the lives of the 12 million African Americans living in the United States at that time. The passionate speech by Mr. Max covers the theme of blindness, and how the white populace uses it to shield themselves from guilt. Also, he uses an extended metaphor to depict how the ghettos merely fuelled the oppression and crime of the city. Similarly to the containment of the blacks in ghettos he mentions the lack of expression and freedom, which connects to important symbols mentioned earlier in the novel. The passionate and urgent tone to the speech also shows promise for the future as Max makes his heartfelt speech in hopes of change for an oppressed people.
In Native Son, Richard Wright introduces Bigger Thomas, a liar and a thief. Wright evokes sympathy for this man despite the fact that he commits two murders. Through the reactions of others to his actions and through his own reactions to what he has done, the author creates compassion in the reader towards Bigger to help convey the desperate state of Black Americans in the 1930’s.
In Native Son, the character Bigger Thomas is highly oppressed and treated as an outcast in society. This relationship with society is nearly identical to that of the creature in Frankenstein. Bigger Thomas did not choose which race he would be born as, nor did he chose to live in a time of oppression. Despite all this, Bigger is still treated as inferior to white people all throughout the novel. After being raised in an environment in which he was told he would never be able to amount to his dreams, Bigger eventually stretches past his limits and becomes enraged. He uses his anger to rationalize his view of the accidental murder of Mary Dalton. When Bigger’s girlfriend tells him that he will be accused of raping Mary, Bigger thinks:
Bigger is a young black man living in the Southside of Chicago with his mother and two younger siblings. His family lives in a one room apartment, leaving little space for privacy. After being awoken by the sudden clang of an alarm clock, the Thomas’s start their day like every other before it. As the family is getting dressed a large rat runs into the room, causing chaos. Bigger trapped the rat in a box, giving it no way to escape. Looking at Bigger “the rat’s belly pulsed with fear. Bigger advanced a step and the rat emitted a long thin song of defiance, its black beady eyes glittering” (Wright 6). The fear that pulses in the belly of the rat is the same fear that runs through Bigger. Bigger is trapped within the physical walls of his run-down apartment and the city lines that the white society has put around the Chicago Black Belt. Bigger and the black community have no choice or way to escape. The confinement of these areas causes Bigger to feel confusion and anger towards those who have put him
Bigger Thomas wasn’t just one man but every man Richard Wright, the writer of Native Son, had encounter in his childhood and adulthood. Wright had encountered a nice Bigger, violent Bigger, and a Bigger Thomas who hated the white society. He combined all of these Thomases and created Bigger Thomas in Native Son. Bigger filled with enrage and fear of the whites accidentally kills a white woman and tries to run away, but only to end in a prison cell waiting for his punishment. Bigger’s definition of himself and the white society had limited his possibilities of having a greater future but Bigger could have went to the right path if he had controlled himself and his choicies.
Richard Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home” confronts a young black person’s forced maturation at the hands of unsympathetic whites. Through his almost at times first person descriptions, Wright makes Big Boy a hero to us. Big Boy hovers between boyhood and adulthood throughout the story, and his innocence is lost just in time for him to survive. Singled out for being larger than his friends, he is the last to stand, withstanding bouts with white men, a snake, and a dog, as we are forced to confront the different levels of nature and its inherent violence.
In Darryl Pinckney’s discerning critical essay, “Richard Wright: The Unnatural History of a Native Son,” Pinckney states that all of Wright’s books contain the themes of violence, inhumanity, rage, and fear. Wright writes about these themes because he expresses, in his books, his convictions about his own struggles with racial oppression, the “brutal realities of his early life.” Pinckney claims that Wright’s works are unique for Wright’s works did not attempt to incite whites to acknowledge blacks. Wright does not write to preach that blacks are equal to whites. The characters in Wright’s works, including Bigger Thomas from Native Son, are not all pure in heart; the characters have psychological burdens and act upon their burdens. For instance, Bigger Thomas, long under racial oppression, accidentally suffocates Mary Dalton in her room for fear that he will be discriminated against and charged with the rape of Mary Dalton. Also, according to Pinckney, although the characters of Wright’s books are under these psychological burdens, they always have “futile hopes [and] desires.” At the end of Native Son, Bigger is enlightened by the way his lawyer Max treats him, with the respect of a human being. Bigger then desires nothing but to live, but he has been sentenced to death.
Native Son written by Richard Wright, is a novel that is set in the 1930’s around the time that racism was most prominent. Richard Wright focuses on the mistreatment and the ugly stereotypes that label the black man in America. Bigger Thomas, the main character is a troubled young man trying to live up the expectations of his household and also maintain his reputation in his neighborhood. Wright’s character is the plagued with low self esteem and his lack of self worth is reflected in his behavior and surroundings. Bigger appears to have dreams of doing better and making something of his future but is torn because he is constantly being pulled into his dangerous and troublesome lifestyle. Bigger is consumed with fear and anger for whites because racism has limited his options in life and has subjected him and his family into poverty stricken communities with little hope for change. The protagonist is ashamed of his families’ dark situation and is afraid of the control whites have over his life. His lack of control over his life makes him violent and depressed, which makes Bigger further play into the negative stereotypes that put him into the box of his expected role in a racist society. Wright beautifully displays the struggle that blacks had for identity and the anger blacks have felt because of their exclusion from society. Richard Wright's Native Son displays the main character's struggle of being invisible and alienated in an ignorant and blatantly racist American society negatively influenced by the "white man".
Bigger often finds himself lashing out as a way to handle his own fear. He is afraid of not being able to help his family enough and so treats them harshly, holding “toward them an attitude of iron reserve” (10). He is afraid of holding up Blum, a white man, and so projects his own fear onto Gus. He berates him for it, calling him “‘yellow’” when he hesitates to take the job (26). Bigger has been so psychologically beat down in his own community and trained to believe that he is a lesser person that he even feels the need to get ahead amongst his own friends, fighting Gus to “feel the equal” of him (41). Yet his anger still translates most directly to the white people whom he blames for it. He describes the deep and "inarticulate hate" he feels toward Jan and Mary but cannot place the immediate cause of it. This is the partial and subconscious reason that Bigger kills Mary (67). For the first time, Bigger feels a semblance of control over his situation and over the white world that Mary represents in that moment. However, Bigger also knows very consciously that if he is discovered in her room he will be accused of rape just for being black, and so he knows his only option is to make sure he isn’t discovered. In this way, though it was not entirely on purpose, the violent act of suffocating Mary comes about as a result of Bigger’s
Bigger embodies one of humankind’s greatest tragedies of how mass oppression permeates all aspects of the lives of the oppressed and the oppressor, creating a world of misunderstanding, ignorance, and suffering. The novel is loaded with a plethora of images of a hostile white world. Wright shows how white racism affects the behavior, feelings, and thoughts of Bigger. “Everytime I think about it, I feel like somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down my throat. We live here and they live there.
As a young man Bigger was a magnet to trouble; however, his identity is unveiled once he attains a job at the home of the Dalton’s. Operating in the mind of double-consciousness prompts two murders, the rape of his girlfriend and fleet from the police; result in Bigger facing a trail for such charges. Wright depicts Bigger, as uncertain of his actions, “I didn’t want to kill,” Bigger shouts. “But what I killed for, I am! It must’ve been pretty deep in me to make me kill”(Native Son