Comparing Identity In Native Son And Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Identity in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Alice Walker's The Color Purple

Personal identity is vital to living a worthwhile life. A person who goes through life without knowing what he or she stands for and believes in is living an incomplete life. Those who lack an understanding of their identity will unintentionally accept outsiders’ opinions and stereotypes of them. This harmful position can be seen in many characters from the African-American Literature class. Bigger Thomas, from Richard Wright’s, Native Son, is one lost character. Another character who lacks understanding is Alice Walker’s Celie, from The Color Purple. Both of these characters have a different awareness level of the position that they stand in, and that

When looking for a reason for him to murder Mary, Max asks Bigger when he started hating Mary. Bigger responds, “I hated her as soon as she spoke to me, as soon as I saw her. I reckon I hated her before I saw her.” (Wright 326) Before even meeting Mary, Bigger had his opinion of her set; she was white so she was bad. He didn’t think there could be a good white person because he had only experienced the wrath of the white race. Damon Marcel DeCoste looks at how Bigger’s experiences with whites has been up to this time in his life:

“Yet if Bigger knows these facts of his own oppression, his response is an attempt to erase this reality, to deny its status as fact and to retreat to a position where its factuality cannot reach him. Rankling at his own circumscribed existence, Bigger withdraws from it, from the world that rebukes him, from those other blacks as sorry and powerless as he, finally from his own consciousness of the real itself. Indeed, because of what he knows of this reality, Bigger pursues a studied rejection of it.”

She is not taught the ways of the world to understand the possibilities for happiness. She lets others create her being because she does not resist them. She follows what they tell her to do because she was never presented the idea of her being an individual capable of doing what she wanted.

Celie goes from one man’s house to another and very little changes. Her life knows no joy or happiness. Everything she does is out of duty to her husband. She has no self-worth and lives a quiet life following orders. Her husband abuses her in every sense of the word. He abuses her physically when she does something incorrect, or not to his liking; he abuses her sexually because Celie does not even understand that sex is meant to be something enjoyable; and her abuses her emotionally because he belittles every aspect of her.

Everything changes for Celie the day that Shugs enters her life. Shugs personality and actions confound Celie’s mind. Celie has never met a woman with as much vitality as Shugs has. Celie’s husband is grappling at every chance he can have to make Shugs happy. Shugs has total control over him and she knows it. She uses her confidence to make Mister shake with fear. He wants to make her happy and is willing to do anything that she desires. Celie had observed this behavior in Harpo, but she could not apply that to her own life because she saw him as young