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Invisible Shadows
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Native Son / 0-06-080977-9
This book should be read alongside Ellison's superb Invisible Man. Native Son employs much the same idea - namely, that it is difficult to NOT become what others want to force you to become.
Bigger, the focus of this novel, is a good man. He's not the best, or the smartest, or the oldest, or the wisest, but he has a good heart. He wants to become a better person - he wants to BE 'bigger' in a real sense of personal growth. Not that he would think of it in these terms - Bigger is a simple man at heart.
When Bigger finds himself innocently trapped in a compromising position - a position that will be misunderstood, a position that will cause him to bear the worst of false accusations, a position that could cost his freedom and even his life - he tries his best to cover up the situation as best he possibly can. But he cannot protect himself from the stereotypes and prejudices that plague him and, in the end, he becomes the very monster that everyone around him insisted on seeing in him. He is plagued by guilt, both for what he has done and for the damage he has done to others who look like him. And yet, he cannot truly be blamed for this, because it is clear that those who hated him made sure, through systematic disenfranchisement, that he would fail eventually.
Whereas Ellison's invisible man was able to disappear completely, Wright's Bigger was not so lucky, yet both are equal victims.
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Terrific
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Richard Wright's 1940 novel, Native Son, violates two of the basic tenets of modern MFA dogma. The first is that it starts off very slowly, then builds up a powerful narrative steam (although not of the simplistic plot-driven variety), and the second is that it is a tale that overwhelmingly `tells' what is happening, rather than `showing', which violates all the simplistic MFA workshop prohibitions against same. Yet, it is a great novel- despite some flaws in length and occasional descriptive lapses into banality, because, by its end, and the courtroom speeches for and against the protagonist- a killer and rapist named Bigger Thomas, your average reader is wholly involved in the vortical scenario. And this scenario wholly undercuts the thesis that this book is about life as a black man. Instead, it is about life in America in the late 1930s, during the wane of the Great Depression, and just before the start of World War Two. In a sense, this book is an black urban counterpart to John Steinbeck's rural white The Grapes Of Wrath, even if it's a tad lesser of a work, much as Carson McCullers' The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter covers similar psychological ground as Betty Smith's A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, even though the former's protagonist is a Southern adult white male, and the latter's an adolescent New York female. When first released (in expurgated form; the unexpurgated version did not see daylight for over fifty years), it was a bestseller, with over 300,000 hard copies sold, and Wright immediately became a black icon and spokesman, but neither stage nor film versions of the tale have ever had the impact that the book did. A 1951 film version, made in Argentina, and starring a fortysomething non-actor Wright as Bigger, was ridiculed critically across the globe.
The novel, written in the third person omniscient- thus almost all `telling,' is divided into three long chapters, or `Books,' as in the older literary sense....All of these points, and more- too lengthy to detail in a mere review, prove that the book is far beyond its most strident and ignorant critics' claims, and is still as relevant (sadly) today, as ever; in the delusions that the poor are fed- be it of race, then, or war, today. It is no coincidence that, upon the eve of World War Two, Bigger dreams of a career in the military, as a flyboy, even as his race denied that possibility. It is also relevant in the ways that society delimits many of its citizens via poverty, in the way crimes are seized upon by politicians, the media, and authority figures to boost their careers, or even in how little everyday people, no matter their sex nor color, truly understand themselves. In the end, the biggest thing that Bigger Thomas admits is his fear of the act of cogitation, for with that comes realization, in every sense of the word, including of the self. And that is likely the reason so many readers misunderstand it- for how many can grasp what they lack? It is also why so many critics likely misinterpret such a challenging and great work as Native Son.
Think. Read. Then think again. Then repeat.
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A Predestined Path of Life
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Author, Richard Wright, weaves a fictional tale of Bigger Thomas, a 20 yr. black male living, striving in the Black Belt of Chicago. The story takes place sometime ago when the world seemed to be a lot different, but make no mistake about it, most of us know that Bigger Thomas still exists today. Early in the first chapter, Fear, Wright describes Bigger as:
"...a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night; but the sun that made it bloom and the cold darkness that made it wilt were never seen. It was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness. He was bitterly proud of his swiftly changing moods and boasted when he had to suffer the results of them. It was the way he was, he would say; he could not help it, he would say.... And it was his sullen stare and the violent action that followed that made Gus and Jack and G.H. hate and fear him as much as he hated and feared himself."
The more one becomes familiar with Bigger, the more one realizes that a tragedy will befall Bigger; a tragedy that is a result of his own doing. Bigger's instincts, honed by the pressures of being black and poor, will lead him down a path of ill-fated acts. The reader shadows his every move in the second chapter, Flight, and watches his destiny come to fruition in Fate, the final chapter.
If you want to experience oppression, race relations, poverty through the plight of a young black male in the early 20th Century, then this is one of the books to read.
As a final note, I couldn't help but notice the Du Boisian references, where on occasion, Bigger is portrayed as being "...behind a veil" or "...behind a curtain".
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Wright is right
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Richard Wright's America is still here. July, 2008- events of today could be taken from this novel or his short stories.
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"Native Son": A Polemic On the Poverty of the Poor
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Indeed, Richard Wright's "Native Son" is a polemic about what happens to the poor who are impovished by the psychic chain of economic poverty coupled with rascism and class discrimination. Often I am thinking about black life and I am reminded of Bigger's mantra, "I didn't want to kill." And yet he did and many have and, sadly enough, as Wright suggests, it is after the killings that the Biggers of the world find a piece of their own humanity.The question is, thus, this: Does a death compell one to be human? I wonder what Wright would say?In the Sanctuary of a South
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| Editorial Reviews: |
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Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
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Bigger Thomas is doomed, trapped in a downward spiral that will lead to arrest, prison, or death, driven by despair, frustration, poverty, and incomprehension. As a young black man in the Chicago of the '30s, he has no way out of the walls of poverty and racism that surround him, and after he murders a young white woman in a moment of panic, these walls begin to close in. There is no help for him--not from his hapless family; not from liberal do-gooders or from his well-meaning yet naive friend Jan; certainly not from the police, prosecutors, or judges. Bigger is debased, aggressive, dangerous, and a violent criminal. As such, he has no claim upon our compassion or sympathy. And yet... A more compelling story than Native Son has not been written in the 20th century by an American writer. That is not to say that Richard Wright created a novel free of flaws, but that he wrote the first novel that successfully told the most painful and unvarnished truth about American social and class relations. As Irving Howe asserted in 1963, "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. It made impossible a repetition of the old lies [and] brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture." Other books had focused on the experience of growing up black in America--including Wright's own highly successful Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of five stories that focused on the victimization of blacks who transgressed the code of racial segregation. But they suffered from what he saw as a kind of lyrical idealism, setting up sympathetic black characters in oppressive situations and evoking the reader's pity. In Native Son, Wright was aiming at something more. In Bigger, he created a character so damaged by racism and poverty, with dreams so perverted, and with human sensibilities so eroded, that he has no claim on the reader's compassion: "I didn't want to kill," Bigger shouted. "But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder.... What I killed for must've been good!" Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. "It must have been good! When a man kills, it's for something... I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em. It's the truth..." Wright's genius was that, in preventing us from feeling pity for Bigger, he forced us to confront the hopelessness, misery, and injustice of the society that gave birth to him. --Andrew Himes
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