Analysis Of Dramatic Conflict In Native Son

The dramatic conflict of Native Son (1940) takes place within the mind of the protagonist, Bigger Thomas. Born black and thereby subservient and unwanted in a white world of hostility, hatred and suspicion, Bigger’s total self-concept is governed by outside force that give him a feeling of inadequacy, incompleteness, and an eerie urge to seek that one thing in life that will make him present, that one thing that will give him mastery over his environment, that one thing will give him power to re-create society and thus himself. Bigger understands his impotence as the doing of white supremacist society and thus feels resentment against the white world that keeps him living. His hatred and desire to overthrow his white environment transmutes into sexual arousal when presented with a female body. Through Bigger’s conditioned hatred, the white and black female bodies bear the brunt of the violence precipitated by the race-class system. While his actions illuminate the violence that occurs when the white female body is seen as a symbol of inaccessible white power, it also makes clear that it is the black female body that suffers sexual violence and bears the burden of not being seen because of it.

The black beast rapist theory terrorized black man with the threat of lynching. It lessened the white fear that by having

Her attempts at realizing social equality and refusal to stand her distance and remain in her patriarchal assigned place, in most cases violations prompted by Jan, provokes sexual and violent desires in Bigger: He felt baked, transparent; he felt that this white man, having helped to put his down, having helped to deform him, held hip up now to look at him and be amused. At the moment he felt toward Mary and Jan a dumb, cold, and in articulate hate (Wright 66). Feeling naked, transparent and cold, Bigger wants to destroy them, their bodies and their