AUTHOR: Nicholas Birns

When Richard Wright’s Native Son appeared on March 1, 1940, many reviewers were quick to point out that it was groundbreaking work that introduced something radically new into American and African American literary traditions. Harry Hansen’s review in the New York World-Telegram, for example, remarked that the book packed “a tremendous punch, something like a big fist through the windows of our complacent lives,” establishing Wright as “a new and powerful novelist” (Reilly 47). Several other reviewers explained the originality of Wright’s novel in terms of its strikingly new kind of central character: an embittered, undereducated black man who has been so cut off from mainstream American life that he finds a kind of psychological fulfillment in acts of terrifying racial violence. Milton Rugoff’s review in the New York Herald Tribune Books stressed that “the first extraordinary aspect of Native Son is that it approaches the tragedy of race, not through an average member but through a criminal” and that such a character is developed by Wright to “connect one individual’s pathology to the whole tragedy of the Negro spirit in the white world” (Reilly 52). Sterling Brown in Opportunity likewise praised Native Son as a “literary phenomenon” because it was the very first novel about black Americans that provided “a psychological probing of the consciousness of the outcast, the disinherited, the generation lost in the slum jungles of American civilization” (Reilly 95–96). Margaret Wallace’s New York Sun review sensed a “peculiar vitality” in the book that added “something to the reader’s mind which was not there before.” She concluded that Native Son was “the finest novel written by an American Negro” and that it was likely to “father other books” (Reilly 60–61).

What all of these reviews stress is the fact that Wright’s novel boldly describes a new kind of cultural encounter between a radically alienated, deeply embittered black man and a dominant white society that is unable to perceive him as a human being. Over the past seventy years many scholars and critics have confirmed this belief of the early reviewers that Native Son was a powerful, seminal text that not only transformed American literature but also fundamentally changed the way Americans envisioned race. Irving Howe in 1963 proclaimed that

Keneth Kinnamon aptly observed in 1972 that “with Native Son Wright became one of the most important figures of twentieth century American fiction” (Emergence 18). Four years later, Eugene Redmond characterized Wright as “the father of the black novel” and “one of the most influential and dominant forces of American literature,” praising Native Son as a book that “summed up the emotional and psychological history of black urban America” (224). And Arnold Rampersad’s 1991 essay, “Too Honest for His Own Time” also argued that Wright’s “fearlessness” in honestly depicting American racial problems in Native Son enabled him to chart bold new directions in African American literature. Rampersad stressed that “compared with him, some of the bravest earlier black writers seem almost timid” (3).

So Wright’s reputation as a seminal writer is secure. But many critics who are quick to praise Wright’s power and originality are slow to recognize his skill as an artist. As Rampersad noted, “Virtually from the day of its publication, the artistry of Native Son has been questioned and found wanting” (“Introduction” xx). Howard Mumford Jones’s review of Native Son, while praising the novel’s “great power” objected to its “melodramatic” plot that reduced its themes to “dull propaganda” (Reilly 47). Jonathan Daniels, while conceding that Wright’s book contained “authentic powerful writing,” nevertheless complained that it ultimately degenerated into a political “tract” (Reilly 50–51), which stereotypes characters and oversimplifies themes to deliver its message. Clifton Fadiman’s New Yorker review, likewise, grants that Native Son is a “powerful” novel but has “numerous defects as a work of art” such as “paper thin” white characters, a melodramatic plot, and a shallow vision of life depicting human experience “solely in social terms,” which fails to capture “dense, many sided, and shifting reality” (Reilly 48–50).

These complaints from the early reviews about the alleged aesthetic deficiencies of Native Son were amplified in important studies of the novel done in the 1950s and 1960s and continue to the present day. James Baldwin’s influential analysis in Notes of a Native Son faulted the book for being a “protest” novel that fails to capture the full richness and complexity of African American experience. Baldwin argued that by oversimplifying Bigger’s character to serve the needs of the novel’s political thesis, Wright has ironically made him a kind of racial “monster” (34), reinforcing the negative stereotypes of blacks held by whites. Ralph Ellison argued that Wright’s commitment to political ideology led him to practice a “harsh naturalism,” which prevented him from creating an art that could express the full range of human experience that “more supple modes of fiction” (122) would make possible. Like Baldwin, Ellison strongly believed that Wright’s commitment to social “protest” produced “bad writing” and “a simple failure of craft” (142) because it narrowed his vision and encouraged him to use crudely naturalistic techniques.

In recent years, the most complete attack on Wright’s artistry can be found in Harold Bloom’s introduction to his 2009 collection of essays on Wright. While praising Wright for his “will, force, and drive” and acknowledging him as a “pioneer” in the development of African American literature, Bloom relegates him to a very low status when applying “only aesthetic standards” to his work. He faults Wright for having “a bad authorial ear” (2) that results in graceless, imprecise diction, flat characterization, and inconsistent use of point of view. Labeling Wright as “the son of Dreiser” (1), he asserts that he “could not rise always even to Dreiser’s customarily bad level of writing” (1). In an introduction to an earlier series of essays on Wright, Bloom went as far as to claim that reading Native Son was “not in itself an aesthetic experience” (Richard Wright, 3), however important the novel might be as a social document.

Donald Gibson once observed that “the difficulty most critics have who write about Native Son is that they do not see Bigger Thomas. They see him with their outer eyes but not their inner eyes” (729). A similar claim may be made about the ways in which the art of Native Son has been misperceived. Critics have been so struck by the novel’s extraordinary “power” that they have been blinded to its very considerable conscious artistry. As a result, even astute readers such as Baldwin, Ellison, and Bloom have misinterpreted the novel because they have failed to perceive its subtle art that creates very complex, nuanced meanings.

For example, many false readings of Native Son are rooted in a failure to understand how Wright carefully employs point of view in that novel. Reviewers like Daniels who claim that “the story of Bigger Thomas is the story of a rat” (Reilly 50) or critics like Baldwin who reduce Bigger to “a monster created by the American republic” (34) fail to understand how Wright consciously uses third-person point of view in a nearly Jamesian way1 to create a much richer, more complexly human character than most of the novel’s readers are aware of. In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright emphasized that the novel is filtered through a mode of narration technically known as “third person limited,” which projects the novel through the author’s voice but restricts itself rigorously to the central character’s consciousness:

This point of view, which Henry James used brilliantly in novels such as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903), not only creates “a richer illusion of reality” because it simulates the way all of us are restricted to our subjective consciousness, but it also opens up rich possibilities for irony, since it allows us some distance from the character’s perspective, coming to us through the author’s voice. Wright can therefore plunge us dramatically into the character’s consciousness, enabling us to experience his mode of living, but it can also succeed in “conveying more than that to the reader.” We thus perceive Bigger simultaneously from two angles of vision, seeing him from the inside and the outside. The novel’s narrator repeatedly makes clear to the reader what Bigger is only dimly aware of, “There were two Biggers” (Wright, Native 252), a hardened outer self that, when pressured by environment, can explode in rat-like, monstrous violence and a softer inner self that is altogether human. As Wright makes clear in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” “Bigger, as I saw and felt him, was a snarl of many realities; he had in him many levels of life” (450). While characters like Buckley are so blinded by racial stereotypes that they see him as a “monster” (412) and the howling mob intent on lynching him in Book 3 reduce him to a “black ape” (337), Wright artfully utilizes a point of view that enables the careful reader to view Bigger as a complex human being. Although his environment treats him as an animal and a beast and this provokes him to terrible acts of violence, Wright stresses that Bigger is much more than what his environment tries to make him.

This is made clear in an early scene where he is able for a few brief moments to relax and operate independently from the intense pressures of his environment. Hanging out on the streets with Gus, Bigger demonstrates that he is not simply the “tough guy” most people. He also has a “soft” human side to his character that aspires to a better life and a more fully realized self. Although one part of Bigger resents Gus and later almost kills him in a poolroom fight, another part responds to Gus in a personal, even affectionate, way. Indeed, Bigger shares with his friend his most deeply felt longing: a desire to be a pilot and to “fly” (16) beyond the harsh restrictions ruling his life. When Gus reminds him of the ways in which white society will frustrate these hopes, Bigger does not lash out with reflexive hatred but instead jokes about the situation, transforming his pain and resentment into a complexly ironic awareness that the two of them enjoy.

Bigger can use consciousness to mitigate the effects of his severely restrictive environment. This part of Bigger possesses the normal drives of a twenty-year-old American male responding to the opportunities of American life. Leaning against a “brick wall” (15)—an obvious reminder of an environment intent on depriving him of these opportunities—he nevertheless can feel an understandable urge to transcend his narrow existence and become part of a fluid world of movement and possibility:

This is the Bigger Thomas whom most critics fail to see because his actions violate their standard view as a stereotyped “bad nigger” or victim of society. Despite the fact that Bigger will later kill two women after his normal drives toward love have been twisted by environment, here he takes an altogether normal pleasure in watching the “gentle sway” of a woman’s body as she enters a building. And whereas the novel’s key scenes of violence are acted out at night during powerful snowstorms that reflect his turbulent, uncontrolled emotions, Bigger here relaxes and enjoys the “sun burning dazzling yellow” and the white clouds floating in a clear, bright sky. Rigidly trapped in confining rooms throughout the novel, Bigger at this point is given a rare opportunity to become a part of the natural, fluid world that evokes his “casual curiosity.” The fast-moving cars, the drifting clouds, the gracefully walking woman touch Bigger at the core of his being, revealing a person who has all the usual instincts for a life of change and possibility.

As environmental pressures later force Bigger to act violently, Wright makes us keenly aware of Bigger’s inward, human self by skillfully probing the images that flit through Bigger’s subconscious mind, even as he performs these grisly acts. When Bigger amorally gloats over his killing of Mary, Wright makes us fully aware of Bigger’s very moral inward nature by describing images arising from the conscience he is trying to suppress. One is the picture of Mary’s severed head, something that repeatedly torments Bigger. When he gets out of bed the morning after Mary’s death, he is shaken when his subconscious mind generates “an image of Mary’s head lying on the wet newspapers” (99). Riding a streetcar to the Dalton house a short while later, he consciously rejects any guilt over killing Mary—“He did not feel sorry for Mary; she was not real to him, not a human being” (114)—and he actually feels “justified” (114) in killing her. But on a deeper level, his mind does respond to Mary as a person and feels profoundly troubled about killing her, for he cannot get “that lingering image of Mary’s head . . . from before his eyes” (113). When Bigger arrives at the Dalton house, this image becomes even more vivid and his moral reaction becomes more explicit. He is compulsively drawn to the furnace in the basement, and when he opens the furnace door, he looks into the fire, imagining “the vision of Mary and her bloody throat” (118), all the while consumed with both guilt and fear.

Wright clearly establishes the fact that the image of Mary’s head, rather than being representative of Bigger’s fear of getting caught is instead a poetic image arising from Bigger’s moral imagination, telling him that in killing Mary he has killed part of himself. Indeed, Wright has Bigger point imagining his own head in the same terms that he had earlier imagined Mary’s. After having been questioned about the night Mary died and secretly relishing his killing of Mary because it “evened the score” (164) against the white world, Bigger falls asleep and has a dream that runs counter to his coldly amoral thoughts. He imagines himself carrying a large package in his hands while walking down a dark street. He is alarmed when he hears the “ringing of a distant church bell” (165) and panics when the bell tolls more loudly, seeming to ring “directly above his head” (165). He then runs into an alley, unwraps the package, and discovers that it contains “his own head . . . lying with black face and half-closed eyes” (165). The sounds of the bell get progressively louder, and when Bigger runs away to hide from its noise, he finds himself surrounded by white people. The dream concludes with Bigger throwing the severed head into the crowd of whites, cursing them and the bell.

This dream, rendered in a powerful stream of consciousness that exposes Bigger’s most private self, establishes that Bigger is not a monster who wantonly kills and is incapable of feeling the implications of his actions. He not only feels guilty about having deprived Mary of life but is also aware, as the discovery of his own head in the package suggests, that in killing Mary he has also destroyed part of himself. Bigger’s dream, which uses imagery of noise, darkness, and entrapment found in the novel’s opening scenes, shows him to be more than a cornered animal; he possesses a moral imagination that is uniquely human.

Many students and scholars fail to understand how Wright’s subtle use of point of view functions in Native Son and therefore miss many of the novel’s most important ironies. They usually make the mistake of equating the narrator’s views with Bigger’s perceptions and thus fall into the trap of grossly oversimplifying the novel. This is particularly true in their responses to Bigger’s extended meditations on his acts of violence. For example, many readers have argued that when Bigger gloats over his killing of Mary and imagines that the accident has empowered him with a “new life” (105) that Wright shares his “elation” (107). They fail to see the ironic distance between narrator and character that third-person point of view makes possible and succumb to two false images of Wright: He is a misogynist who endorses violence against women, and he is a communist revolutionary who advocates violence against the white system, which Mary represents.

Bigger’s violence provides a form of rebellion that gives an illusory sense of power in a world that reduces him to paralysis. Wright does not valorize violence. Instead, he makes clear that Bigger’s killing has disempowered him in two ways: It will inevitably lead to his own death, thus fulfilling his mother’s prophecy that “the gallows is at the end of the road you travelling, boy” (9), and by killing Mary, Bigger has also severely harmed his innermost human self. Wright, who was strongly influenced by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Joseph Conrad, sees Bigger as Conrad saw Kurtz and Dostoevsky regarded Raskolnikov, as a person who is humanly damaged by acts of violence, which he mistakenly regards as empowering.2 And just as Conrad observed that “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (50), Wright could very well be claiming in Native Son that America contributed to the making of Bigger Thomas. Wright saw Bigger’s violence as a kind of time bomb planted by an unjust, racist environment, and at no point in the novel does he romanticize it.

Wright deplores Bigger’s violence but stresses throughout the novel that it does not derive from any innate perversity in Bigger’s character but instead from the white culture that he encounters throughout his life. To dramatize the lethal effects of mainstream society on Bigger’s behavior, Wright uses patterns of imagery that emphasize the separation between Bigger and the white world. Bigger perceives this world as powerful images of whiteness, coldness, and darkness that define a nightmarish experience that confuses and threatens him and drive him to reflexive acts of violence. Because he lives in a coldly segregated world, neither he nor whites regard each other as human beings. For example, when Bigger first appears at the Dalton’s home to begin work for them, he sees this “cold and distant world” (44) as so strange and hostile that he carries a gun with him for protection. Wright later emphasizes that “to Bigger his kind white people were not really people; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep, swirling river stretching at one’s feet in the dark” (114). Most of the major scenes, therefore, take place at night while it is snowing heavily, suggesting a social world that can freeze blacks into restrictive social roles or actually deprive them of life.

A powerful epiphany of Bigger’s failed cultural encounters with mainstream society comes in Book 2 when he is being questioned by reporters who then discover Mary Dalton’s bones in the furnace. Sensing that he will be identified as Mary’s killer, Bigger panics, bolts to his upstairs bedroom, and tries to escape by jumping out the window. He then falls into a massive pile of snow, which threatens to freeze, blind, or suffocate him:

His physical “struggle against snow” (221) symbolically represents all of his encounters with white culture that threaten him with paralysis and then trigger reflexive actions that prove to be self-destructive.

Wright also stresses that as white people encounter black culture, they are similarly blinded, confused, and forced into equally destructive behavior. No white character in the novel can adequately see Bigger as an individual person because they have been so radically separated from blacks by “walls” of physical segregation and emotional fear. The mob that wants to lynch Bigger in Book 3 regards him as a “black ape” (337), and Buckley, the prosecuting attorney, presents him as a “fiend” (407), a “half-human black ape” (408), and a “black mad dog” (409). Even his lawyer refers to him repeatedly as a “boy” (395), little realizing how insulting this term is to a young black man. And just as Bigger wants to lash out violently against a culture to which he feels no human connection, so too does white society want to “blot out” Bigger by executing him rather than humanly encountering him.

Another source of formal artistry in Native Son that has never been properly understood and has not received sufficient attention from critics and students is its elaborate narrative structure. Here again, the novel’s enormous “power” has obscured its craftsmanship. In “How ‘Bigger’ was Born” Wright reveals that he had serious difficulty working out a coherent narrative shape to his novel that after four years of writing had become an unwieldy manuscript substantially longer than the completed novel that appeared in 1940. He had particularly frustrating problems writing the opening scene and drafted “twenty or thirty” (456) versions. He needed an episode that could anchor the novel by providing it with a clear, coherent principle of organization. As he reveals in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,”

In other words, he was searching for an episode that would, like the first two pages of Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, telescope the entire novel, using images, symbols, and actions that would resonate in various forms throughout the book. This “motif structure” closely resembles musical composition such as jazz, which might state themes in embryonic form at the beginning of a piece and then make complex variations on those themes, deepening and enriching the music. Wright reveals in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” that he was so frustrated with his failure to produce such an opening scene that he “sneaked out and got a bottle” (456), hoping to relieve his anxiety with alcohol. But his drinking somehow released the energies buried in his subconscious mind and he fastened on the image of Chicago being a Great Lakes city plagued with rats. He then “let the rat walk” (460) into his imagination, allowed the rat to do “his stuff” (460), and the novel’s famous opening scene emerged. It was precisely what he was looking for, a “motif” that provided him with a structural principle upon which the entire book could be built. He then “reworked the book” (460) to make it consistent with the opening scene, cutting extraneous scenes and “developing themes that had only been hinted at in the first draft” (461). Significantly, “the entire guilt theme than runs through Native Son was woven in after the first draft was written” (461). Although the image of the rat initially sprang from Wright’s subconscious mind, he was careful to bring it under artistic control through extremely conscious artistry, for Wright wanted to make his readers sharply aware that the novel was centered, not in a rat, but in a richly imagined human being who was treated by his society as a rat. The “guilt theme” that Wright grafts into the novel endows Bigger with a deeply human conscience.

The narrative structure of Native Son, therefore, can be seen as a tightly organized sequence of scenes radiating from the opening episode. The novel breaks down into three closely connected “books,” each of which contains three major scenes arranged in the following order:

It is important to realize that these scenes do not mechanically repeat each other but provide variations like a musical composition that complicate and enrich the themes while deepening our understanding of the central character. Although the opening episode depicts Bigger as a trapped animal who, like the rat, lashes out against an environment intent on destroying him, later scenes portray him in more complex human terms. He finally becomes “bigger” than all of the stereotyped images and roles that his social world imposes on him. Although he begins as a naturalistic victim, he eventually attains no small measure of freedom and selfhood by existentially developing his consciousness and then using that consciousness as a basis for human action.

Threaded through all of these major scenes are networks of images that define Bigger’s deterministic environment. Each incident contains physical or psychological walls that trap Bigger and most take place at night when Bigger’s vision is obscured and his judgment is darkened. At the beginning of the novel, for example, the Thomas family is trapped between the four walls of a cramped one-room apartment and their condition is likened to the rat who is also cornered when the lights are turned on and he is spotted. Bigger’s reflexive violence in killing the rat is repeated many times in the novel when he is confined to similar dark interior spaces and, like the rat, responds with instinctual acts of violence. In Mary’s bedroom, for example, he is physically and psychologically trapped when Mrs. Dalton opens the door and illuminates the room, creating “hysterical terror” (85) in Bigger. This results in his accidentally suffocating Mary and then pressing his body to “the wall” (84) so that he can avoid Mrs. Dalton’s gaze. His near killing of Gus in the poolroom and his murder of Bessie in a cold, dark room of an abandoned apartment building follow the same pattern. In all of these scenes, physical walls and darkness symbolically reflect Bigger’s trapped, blinded consciousness, producing terrible violence erupting from deep fears he can neither understand nor control.

Wright employs another important pattern of images in these scenes that dramatize that Bigger is not an animal hopelessly at the mercy of environment but is a human being endowed with a consciousness that can create the freely willed action he needs to construct a human identity. Ocular images are used systematically throughout the novel to dramatize Bigger’s growth from a blinded victim to a person who can see himself and his world lucidly and then transcend the dehumanizing roles that a racist society has imposed upon him. In the first scene, for example, Bigger rubs his eyes to adjust his vision from total darkness to blinding light (1). Because the ensuing action takes place quickly and Bigger can see it only in a blur, he is forced to act in an unthinking, reflexive way. Bigger’s vision is likewise defective in the poolroom scene, where he views Gus murderously through “the hard glint of his bloodshot eyes” (38) and also in Mary’s pitch-black bedroom, where he accidentally kills her because he can neither physically see her nor mentally envision his situation. But ocular images are used for very different effect in books 2 and 3, which show Bigger becoming increasingly more able to see himself and his world so that he can eventually free himself of the environmental determinants that blinded and trapped him in Book 1. He clearly sees Bessie when he deliberately murders her, turning on the light to get a good view of her face. When he escapes from the authorities, he gradually develops a lucid vision of how he and other blacks are treated in society. Having a clear view of the world around him for the first time in his life, he can begin to gain emotional distance from and psychological control over that world. In this way, he takes crucial steps toward selfhood, planting seeds that eventually flower in Book 3. At the end of the novel, he no longer wants to “whirl and blot [people] from sight” (332) as he had wished earlier in Book 3, but instead he desires to see them and himself as human beings. He comes to see Jan as someone who “had performed an operation upon his eyes,” (289) and later he looks “straight into Max’s eyes” when the two engage in conversation (347). As a result, Bigger is able to dismantle the psychological walls that previously obscured his vision and separated him not only from other people but also from his own human nature. The three major scenes of Book 3, which show Bigger outwardly immobilized in jail but inwardly moving toward increased consciousness and a new sense of self, contrast sharply with the three major scenes of Book 1, which portray Bigger as physically active but visually stunned and psychologically paralyzed. By the end of the novel he might still be invisible, like Ellison’s invisible man, to those who lack his inward resources, but he is no longer blind to himself or to his world.

Bigger’s growth in Book 3 is vividly illustrated by his ability to relate to people in meaningful, humane ways. Whereas in the novel’s first two books he was so trapped by fear and anger that he was unable to form any sustained relationships with friends or family, in the novel’s final section, he breaks out of his trapped condition and achieves surprising human contact with people he had earlier wanted to “blot out.” As the narrator stresses at the beginning of Book 3, “Toward no one in the world did he feel any fear now, for he knew that fear was useless; and toward no one in the world did he feel any hate now, for he knew hate would not help him” (273). Physically trapped and waiting for death, he, paradoxically, achieves the psychological liberation to achieve a “new mode of life” (275) centered in understanding and meaningful connection with other human beings.

A revealing key to this development is his desire and ability to touch others. In Book 1 he is coldly distant from his family and perversely enjoys taunting his sister by dangling the corpse of the rat before her terrified eyes. As the narrator emphasizes at the conclusion of the opening scene, he perceives his family “behind a wall, a curtain” (10) that hides his guilt over not being able to help them by assuming the role of father. He is terrified of touching Mary for fear that she will scream and identify him as a rapist and will touch her only in lust or murderous violence. He refuses to shake Jan’s hand when he meets him in the street because he has been conditioned never to touch or establish eye contact with a white person. And Book 2 ends with his hands physically frozen by the water sprayed on him by the police.

But throughout Book 3, tactile images are transformed to suggest Bigger’s awakened humanity. Encouraged by Jan and Max “to believe in himself” (311), he begins “holding his life in his hands” (288). Observing a fellow black prisoner being manhandled by guards, he feels a genuine “sympathy” (343) and a desire to reach out to another person: “For the first time, Bigger felt that he wanted someone near him, something physical to cling to” (344). On a broader level, Bigger is able to experience a vision of human solidarity in which all people “touch” each other:

Here Bigger is no longer divided into two mutually exclusive selves. As a result of this momentary wholeness, he can tentatively reach out to the world in love rather than violence. Although Bigger’s efforts to touch people will finally be canceled out by the “shock” of his being executed in the electric chair, Wright nevertheless stresses that Bigger in Book 3 achieves a range of human responses not possible for him previously.

Clear evidence of this development is Bigger’s changed view of most of the people he had earlier wanted to “blot out.” He finally overcomes the feelings of shame and resentment he had previously felt toward his mother and at the end of the novel asks Max to tell her “not to worry none” because he is “all right” (428). Listening to Jan reveal his deepest feelings about Mary, he grasps Jan’s humanity and feels genuine remorse for hurting him: “For the first time in his life a white man became a human being to him; and the reality of Jan’s humanity came [to him] in a stab of remorse” (289). He likewise identifies with Jan as he is baited on the witness stand by Buckley, sensing a basic kinship with Jan as an outsider to American society. And part of him comes to realize that his killing of Bessie and Mary is no cause for pride. Rather, he begins to understand that his acts stemmed from his own “blindness,” which resulted in his harming other people and himself:

Bigger’s human awareness is never adequate fully to resolve all his problems because he is never given sufficient time to sustain and develop such an awareness. But Wright does portray him as moving away from the dehumanized violence and impoverished consciousness that characterized his point of view in Books 1 and 2. Through the depth of his own suffering and genuine contact with other people, Bigger is able to “see” much of what he was earlier blind to. He comes to understand that his mother, Jan, Bessie, and Mary are victims of the same society that has brutalized him, and he responds to them with compassion rather than defensive hatred. He also realizes that he killed two people not out of any heroic motive but simply because he was “scared and mad” (354). Moreover, he consciously tries to reconcile his blind feelings with an existential consciousness that can assimilate, transform, and direct those feelings: “He felt he could not move again unless he swung out from the base of his own feelings; he felt he would have to have light in order to act now” (311). Because he makes such a conscious attempt to move from “blind impulses” to “understanding” (361), he begins to live in “a thin, hard core of consciousness” (360).

Although Bigger’s newly developed consciousness never quite becomes the same as Wright’s implied consciousness as third-person narrator, the distance between the two diminishes considerably by the end of the novel. As this diminishing happens, the authorial voice and the central character’s perspective collaborate to produce a vision of life that can be described as both affirmative and ironic. Bigger’s final conversations with Max, Jan, and his mother clearly establish that he has developed a balanced, humane point of view. But his “faint wry bitter smile” described in the novel’s final paragraph also reveals that he is fully aware of the ironic gap between his own humane vision and the way society continues to operate, for he knows society will execute him precisely at that point in his life where he has achieved human self.

Perhaps the novel’s most pointed irony stems from the fact that Bigger dramatically develops as a human being but the static society in which he lives remains a coldly dehumanizing world. The novel’s ending bristles with painful ironies stemming in part from the fact that society has wrongly convicted Bigger of first-degree murder when in fact Mary Dalton’s death was clearly accidental. Moreover, Bigger did in fact murder Bessie Mears but, because she was black, the legal system did not consider her death significant enough to bring to a court of law. Moreover, Wright ironically links society’s execution of Bigger with his earlier killings of Mary and Bessie. All three deaths take place when intimate human activity is initiated but is then aborted by environmentally induced fear and hatred. Just as Bigger’s and Mary’s lovemaking is inverted into killing when Mrs. Dalton strikes terror into Bigger’s heart, Bessie is murdered when Bigger’s attempts to “love” her are overcome by his fear that she will somehow reveal his whereabouts to the police. In a comparable way, the serious conversation begun by Bigger and Max at the end of the novel is cut off by Max’s terror, Bigger’s incomplete understanding, and society’s fear that real human bonds might eventually develop between two such hated people. Native Son therefore concludes with the same brutal irony that has vibrated throughout the novel: Death comes precisely at the threshold of our most deeply human experiences. This finally becomes Wright’s most terrible revelation of a social world that encourages and even necessitates fear and hatred but violently blocks love and understanding wherever it emerges. Bigger Thomas’s cultural encounters with mainstream society result in his own human growth but, ironically, produce no change in the static, rigidly segregated white world.

Because Native Son is a carefully crafted work of art and not a dated period piece providing dusty footnotes to a bygone era, it continues to speak vitally to us today. This is true for two reasons. First, our current society has not overcome the racism, poverty, and injustice so vividly depicted in the novel as many thousands of Americans continue to inhabit the teeming racial ghettoes of our urban centers. Although much social and racial progress has been achieved since Native Son appeared in 1940, we are far from being a “post racial society.” Second, Native Son, because it is a work of art and not a sociological document, achieves the universality that enables it to address problems and articulate values that transcend the times in which it was written. As Wright stressed in a 1955 interview when asked why he devoted himself to writing:

Brilliantly describing the particular conditions of black America during the Great Depression, Native Son also distills broader human meanings that relate to all times and places. This is what Wright meant in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” that his central character was not only a unique individual caught up in very specific cultural circumstances, but that he was also a “meaningful and prophetic symbol” (44) of mankind alienated from traditional sources of human meaning, trapped in a world whose “fundamental assumptions could no longer be taken for granted . . . a world whose metaphysical meanings had vanished” (446). Because of this, Bigger’s resonant story “transcended national and racial boundaries” (443) and he becomes like Faulkner’s Joe Christmas, Camus’s Meursault, and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov—an archetypal figure. As the inscription to Native Son makes clear, Bigger’s story is as old as Job’s whose “stroke is heavier” than his “groaning” (xxiii). But Bigger’s narrative is also as new as the growing number of school killings carried out by young American men who, like Bigger, express their alienation and anger with equally terrible and self-destructive acts of violence.

NOTES

Wright was strongly influenced by Henry James’s artful use of point of view in his major novels, and he carefully studied James’s The Art of the Novel when he was living in Chicago in 1934 and was writing Uncle Tom’s Children while also preparing preliminary notes for Native Son. Wright reread James’s prefaces discussing point of view after he moved to Brooklyn in 1938 and was deeply immersed in the writing of Native Son. Like James, Wright consciously employs point of view to deeply probe the inward life of his central character and also to provide his novel with an important source of formal unity.

Wright also studied how point of view is used in the fiction of Joseph Conrad to create irony and thematic complexity. He was introduced to Conrad’s work in 1927 when he read H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces. Mencken praised Conrad as “a craftsman of the utmost deftness” (30) who used multiple points of view brilliantly to explore the “subjective impulses” (200), the shadowy depths of his central characters. Throughout his career Wright cited Conrad as an important influence. In a 1940 interview published just a few months after the appearance of Native Son, he cited Conrad, along with Dreiser, Joyce, and Dostoevsky as one of the “literary influences” (Kinnamon and Fabre 32) shaping his work.

Several critics have examined the close relationship between Native Son and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s introduction to The Book of the Month Club edition of Native Son drew strong parallels between these novels. See Magistrale for an excellent extended study of this matter. Wright often acknowledged Dostoevsky as an important influence. In Black Boy: American Hunger, for example, he listed the Russian novelist as one of the writers who catalyzed his imagination, providing him with “new ways of looking and seeing” (294). In a 1960 interview, shortly before his death, Wright claimed that “Dostoevsky was my model when I started writing” (Kinnamon and Fabre 241).

Works Cited