Fear, Flight, And Fear In Richard Wright's Native Son

Bigger Thomas feels trapped long before he is incarcerated for killing Mary Dalton. He is trapped in an overpriced apartment with his family and trapped in a white world he has no hope of changing. He knows that he is predisposed to receiving unfair treatment because he is black, but he still always feels as though he is headed for an unpleasant end. The three sections that make up the novel Native Son by Richard Wright, “Fear,” “Flight” and “Fate,” imply a continuous and pervasive cycle throughout Bigger’s life that ultimately leads him to murder. The first stage of this cycle, fear, is the one Bigger finds himself spending most of his time in. He is constantly afraid; afraid of his future and of what will become of his family, but mostly

The fear stems from his and his fellow blacks’ alienation from a culture dominated by whites. The races are so far separated that Bigger and his friends even play a game imitating “the ways and manners of white folks” just to imagine what it would be like to live that way (17). A separation of this magnitude inherently breeds mistrust, and with mistrust comes defensiveness. When Bigger goes to see the Daltons for the first time he brings “his knife and his gun” to “feel the equal of them” (43). This proves that blacks at the time clearly, and rightfully, feel as though whites have the upper hand. Bigger is constantly scrambling for traction in a world in which he is destined to keep slipping. He knows he cannot control or change the way society looks at him, so the only

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