Native
Son By Right
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.
