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Racism in the novel native son
Bigger thomas character analysis essay
Essay on African American literature
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THE DESTRUCTIVE EFFECTS OF RACISM ON BIGGER THOMAS
THESIS: Bigger Thomas represents the black man’s condition and his revolt against the injustices of the white caste society.
When one looks at the contribution of blacks in the world of American literature, Richard Wright is considered one of the great contributors. Truly one of his books which highlights the black’s view of American society has to be Native Son. In Native Son, Richard Wright creates the characterization of “native sons” who are products of American civilization. From his own life experience, he portrays in Bigger Thomas a combination of character traits that illustrate persons who have lost meaning in their lives. Bigger Thomas represents the black man’s condition and his revolt against the injustices of the white caste society.
Richard Wright creates Bigger Thomas into a social symbol for Americans by making him a victim of oppression. Bigger, as well as all other African Americans, is forced to live in poverty. He lives in a crowded, dirty apartment with his mother, brother, and sister. His only way of seeing the white world is through the lives of the Dalton family, his rich employers (Smith 392).
An important factor in Wright’s development of Bigger is the struggle to keep power from the Black society. White men wants the Negro to be restricted from as much control as possible, “for had he had a chance to vote, he would have automatically controlled the richest lands of the South and with them the social, political, and economic destiny of a third of the Republic” (Wright Bigger X1).
Bigger is an ideal portrait of a product of Western culture. Bigger has little control over his life. “Wright builds up rather extensive documentation to prove that Bigger’s actions, behavior, values, attitudes, and fate have already been determined by his status and place in American life” (Margolies Art 1). Bigger is alienated from any kind of relationship. “[Wright] claimed he valued the ‘state of abandonment, aloneness.’ In this he was, finally, a true product of Western culture” (Discovering 5).
Western culture places Bigger, as well as other African Americans, in a position where they are expected to be submissive to whites. Bigger sees violence as the only alternative to “dumb submission to a dehumanizing lot” (Margolies Study 65-66). In Nat...
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Richard Wright uses his surroundings and his acquaintances to create his fictional world. For this reason Bigger Thomas becomes real, a combination of many men in the author’s world. The “native son” represents all “native sons” during this period of American history. Bigger Thomas searches for the answer to the question of how to live in the white man’s society. Native Son is his conclusion.
Bibliography:
Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Southern Ilinois University Press, 1969. Gale Research Inc., 1993.
Native Sons A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Writers. Philadelphia: J. V. Lippincott Company, 1968.
“Richard Nathaniel Wright 1908-1960.” Discovering Authors. Gale Research Inc., 1993.
Sanders, Ronald. “Richard Wright and the Sixties.” Mainstream. Vol. XIV, August-
September, 1968. Gale Research, Inc. 1993.
Smith, Valerie, Lea Baechier, and A Walton Litz. African American Writers. New York:
Macmillan Publishing Company, 1993.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1940. “How Bigger Was Born.” Native Son. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1940.
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
In Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State Virginia, Query 14 & 18 Jefferson uses the literary technique of compare and contrast as well as rhetorical questions to describe how white people are far more superior to slaves. However, by minimizing the validity of the African peoples beauty and way of life he only shows himself to be ignorant and insecure.As a result, Thomas Jefferson's Query 14 & 18 showcases the psychological disabilities that comes with “whiteness”.
Older and modern societies tend to have organized castes and hierarchies designed to encompass everyone in society. This is demonstrated in Richard Wright’s acclaimed novel, Native Son. The novel follows the life of a twenty year old African American man named Bigger Thomas, and his experiences living as a black man in 1930s Chicago, Illinois. Unfortunately, he commits two unlawful killings of women, mostly as a result of the pressure and paranoia that had been following him from a young age. He is tried and convicted of the deaths, and is sentenced to die as a result.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett is an investigative journalist who wrote in honesty and bluntness about the tragedies and continued struggles of the Negro man. She was still very much involved with the issue even after being granted freedom and the right to vote. Statistics have shown that death and disparity continued to befall the Negro people in the South where the white man was “educated so long in that school of practice” (Pg. 677 Par. 2). Yet in all the countless murders of Negroes by the white man only three had been convicted. The white man of the South, although opposed to the freedom of Negroes would eventually have to face the fact of the changing times. However, they took every opportunity and excuse to justify their continued horrors. There were three main excuses that the white man of the South came up w...
John Smith, the troubled Indian adopted by whites appears at first to be the main character, but in some respects he is what Alfred Hitchcock called a McGuffin. The story is built around him, but he is not truly the main character and he is not the heart of the story. His struggle, while pointing out one aspect of the American Indian experience, is not the central point. John Smith’s experiences as an Indian adopted by whites have left him too addled and sad, from the first moment to the last, to serve as the story’s true focus.
"Whenever I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of Western civilization, that they lived somehow in it but not of it. And when I brooded upon the cultural barrenness of black life, I wondered if clean, positive tenderness, love, honor, loyalty, and the capacity to remember were native with man. I asked myself if these human qualities were not fostered, won, struggled and suffered for, preserved in ritual from one generation to another." This passage written in Black Boy, the autobiography of Richard Wright shows the disadvantages of Black people in the 1930's. A man of many words, Richard Wrights is the father of the modern American black novel. Wright has constituted in his novels the social and economic inequities that were imposed in the 30's in hope of making a difference in the Black Community. His writing eventually led many black Americans to embrace the Communist Party.
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
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1995. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-consciousness, manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message f...
Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1986. Kinnamon, Kenneth, ed., pp. 113-117 New Essays on Native Sons. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. Macksey, Richard and Frank E. Moorer, eds.
In Native Son by Richard Wright, Mr. Wright lived in the 1930s and experienced how African Americans were unfairly treated and the extreme poverty that still happens in South Side Chicago. The way Mr. Wright grew up into all the poverty, violence, and being discriminated against placed himself into Bigger Thomas shoes and how handled everything the way he was living with despair. That’s how Mr. Wright sets a psychoanalytic theory in his writing of how he portrays Bigger Thomas, he is self-conscious of his actions and how he wishes to hurt some but doesn’t believe he can bring himself to do that. Bigger Thomas despises the way he lives and how the white people have control over his life but sooner or later he does something that makes him feel superior and equal to a white person.
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
Bigger Thomas as America’s Native Son. In the novel the Native Son, the author Richard Wright explores racism and oppression in American society. Wright skillfully merges his narrative voice into Bigger Thomas so that the reader can also feel how the pressure and racism affects the feelings, thoughts, self-image, and life of a Negro person. Bigger is a tragic product of American imperialism and exploitation in a modern world.
Baldwin, James. “Notes of a Native Son.” 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.