Bigger: A Literary Analysis

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Bigger knows that his hatred of Mary makes no sense, yet he tries to explain it to himself. He feels that his murdering her was more than amply justified by the fear and shame she had made him feel. But he does not know what else she had really done to make him feel this way. Max wants to know, and he replies that he hates her as soon as she spoke to him and as soon as he saw her. Mary stands for the white people who would not let him do the things he wanted to do. They would not let him go to aviator school and learn to fly a plane. They would not even let him be a real soldier or a real sailor. “All they want a black man for is to dig ditches. And in the Navy, all he can do is wash dishes and scrub floors” (NS, 295). And now that he has killed

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