For Mr. Dalton the blindness is his refusal to admit how much he profits from exploiting the black community, and he alleviates his guilt by donating some of the profits to black schools and programs.
In my opinion this reflects how deeply the culture has ingrained itself within Bigger, so much that he struggles to accept the prospect of white people treating him as human. Bigger Thomas is just as blind as the Daltons, and his blindness leads him to violence. Max, however, understands the perspectives of both sides and can see how society is shaping young black men into the exact stereotype they are hoping to escape. Although Jan and Mary are somewhat progressive characters, Max is by the far the most forward thinking.
And, as Max points out, continued oppression of the blacks will someday result in another Civil War in America, which made me think of Looking Backward and the danger of economic oppression. The easy route for the author Richard Wright would've been to write a novel asking us to sympathize with a black man wrongfully accused of murder in a racist community. But he does not take the easy route. Instead he implores the reader to follow Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is absolutely guilty of committing a deplorable act for reasons which he himself cannot fully explain , and forces us to look at the circumstances which might have possibly created this complex m A challenging read.
Instead he implores the reader to follow Bigger Thomas, a young black man who is absolutely guilty of committing a deplorable act for reasons which he himself cannot fully explain , and forces us to look at the circumstances which might have possibly created this complex man.
Although the book isn't perfect and every now and then especially in the last 30 pages delves into bloated preachiness, it still is very engaging and surprisingly suspenseful. It forces you to consider how society in the 's created a man, for whom fear and hate were the only emotions he's ever felt, and how those emotions can lead him to murder. It challenges you to understand that although the murder is essentially accidental, Bigger knows he has done something wrong but is initially unrepentant.
Because after lashing out in a situation he doesn't understand, it is the first time he feels alive, with a purpose and with the control of his own life in his hands. A challenging and important book that pulls aside the curtain and looks dead on at the circumstances that create Bigger Thomas and at the social, class, and racial relations in our society. It is not a strategy consciously devised.
It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality. What a brave and confrontational book this is! Wright could have gone down the easy route of making Bigger Thomas a falsely accused man and generated sympathy by showing him as the victim of a racialised legal system, but he doesn't - instead he gives us a far more complex portrait of Blackness, masculinity and class, all of which collide in Bigger.
Wright's introduction makes the point that Bigger is a composite of men he has known - white as well as black - ill-educated, dispossessed, alienate What a brave and confrontational book this is! Wright's introduction makes the point that Bigger is a composite of men he has known - white as well as black - ill-educated, dispossessed, alienated, angry, violent at times and also scared and hurting at the alien world through which they're trying to navigate.
In so many ways, this feels like a contemporary novel so it's both shocking and disheartening that it was written in - some things have changed, so much hasn't. Bigger is subject to US segregation laws which stop him learning to fly a plane, for example, something which he yearns to do and, given how well he drives, might have given him the skills and pride he is sorely lacking. He is subject to the patronising interest of a philanthropic white family whose own privilege and 'white saviour' complex stops them seeing how uncomfortable they make Bigger with their probing questions and their charity and their desire to be seen eating with him in a Black neighbourhood diner.
Wright's own Communist beliefs shine through, with the foundational analysis of class that underpins the socialised depiction of race - Bigger could almost have been a white working-class young man caught up in a system that devalues and degrades.
There are places where this has the feel of a noir thriller, at others the prose trips over itself in something that gets close to, but is not, stream of consciousness. This isn't a book for readers who need to like a character in order to rate a book, but for the rest of us, this is angry, smart, despairing, raw and ultimately haunting as we contemplate the fate of the Bigger Thomases of our own world. View all 10 comments. Mar 17, Peter rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , literary , african-american-writers , five-stars.
What a powerful book. In narrative, theme, character and motifs, Wright uses his whole arsenal to show us the horrors of racism. He seems to be able to reflect back the experience of racism—how it's created and it's cycle of destruction. I've read other Black writers before, but this book is probably the one that has taken on and embodied racism more so than any other book for me. For a novel written in , the book holds up quite well.
Unfortunately, while our nation has made progress, especi What a powerful book. Unfortunately, while our nation has made progress, especially some legal and institutional progress, this book and the picture it paints is still quite relevant today. The book is very accessible. Wright's prose, while rhythmic and artful, is quite straightforward and easy to read. I can't recommend this book enough, and not just as a means to understand racism from more angles, shine a light on our own behaviors, but also as a gripping literary thriller that has stood the test of time.
Put it on your to-read list. While not strictly true to the source material, especially in some sections, and lacking in some ways that made the book exceptionally powerful, I would still recommend watching the movie of the same name. I won't say much more because this isn't a movie review and I want to be careful of spoilers which I know is something people care deeply about. If you've read the book the only thing to spoil is how the adaptation deviates from the source material.
I won't say anymore on that topic. View all 12 comments. Maybe it's the inevitable melancholy of getting older, but reading this novel for the second time, roughly 13 years after the first go, has made me tremendously sad and despairing. I would like to think the country is so much different 70 years after its publication, but is it? Oct 08, Ryan Lawson rated it it was amazing. Richard Wright's Native Son is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most powerful books that I have read, ever.
This nightmarish story packs such an overwhelming amount of emotion and controversy that it is hard to pull away from much like the sight of a gruesome car crash on an interstate, you don't want to look but you must look. If you're looking for a competent, confident example of verisimilitude in literature then you need not look further. Upon reading this piece, I wondered the entire Richard Wright's Native Son is without a shadow of a doubt one of the most powerful books that I have read, ever.
Upon reading this piece, I wondered the entire time, "How had I not been exposed to this book or Richard Wright? I've yet to read a piece that surpasses the violent honesty of this book; and, perhaps, that is why it is not as much a part of the American-Literature Subconscious Canon. Wright's work isn't as tame as the weary Hughes and he manages to surpass the shocking tact of James Baldwin. Bigger Thomas is a murderous and rapacious young man who through his horrendous acts of rape, theft, and violence somehow manages to elicit an amount of sympathy.
Wright is able to portray him in such a light that makes the reader understand fully that Bigger is committing unconscionable crimes yet no matter how atrocious the crimes are not unforgivable. There were times I felt guilty for rooting for Bigger Thomas, but that is the mastery in Wright's writing!
Bigger is such an uncanny character that it is next to impossible to not feel sympathy for him. If you've ever been in a situation so bad, so unbearable that you actually wished it to be a terrible dream then you will understand Bigger.
You'll beg for him to stop committing these crimes instead of demanding him to be caught and killed. The mob mentality in this book is frightening and dark, darker than Bigger Thomas himself. To think that some of Bigger's case was based on an actual trial of a man named Robert Nixon is almost unbelievable. The hate is so gigantic within the mob. The tragedy is that the mass mentality is controlled by an elite few. This book offers a dramatic understanding of how those in power maintain a steady hand on their subordinates and pit each subordinate against one another so they do not focus on the real monsters, the employers!
It bears witness to the class-struggle of the times and the class-struggles that are still occurring today. Bless this book. It's a good one. View all 8 comments. Jul 11, Esteban del Mal rated it it was amazing Shelves: fiction , americana , novel. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
To view it, click here. I'm busy. I wanted to cool off a bit, not let any of that nebulous white guilt creep into my thinking. The paper stock, the binding, the subject matter they combine for one weighty tome. I came to terms with the material dimensions quickly. The other dimensions? Not so much. I mean, I'm an ethnic Jew, but I identify and pass, thankfully as your run-of-the-mill white American guy.
And white guys have it pretty good thanks, jo. Typically at the expense of others, and most notably blacks. The understanding of my natural advantages in society necessitates that there is, and ever will be, a divide between my experience in society and that of a similarly constituted African-American. I try to bridge that divide as best I can.
Richard Wright has helped me. Wright walks a fine line expertly. His protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is more sociopath than oppressed racial minority for a good one hundred sixty pages.
But then the hammer drops. We overhear the words of an investigating detective: "Well, you see 'em one way and I see 'em another. To me, a nigger's a nigger. Systematically degraded, you lash out and you kill. Is it any wonder? Just as there is a gulf in my understanding of what it is to be black in America, there is a gulf in Bigger Thomas's understanding of what it is to be a human -- because he has never been fully recognized as one. There is a convergence in nature and nurture that sets him on the path to murder.
Already predisposed to be the neighborhood bully, the conditions in which he is raised hone those native instincts into something hard. Hard enough to suffocate a woman, chop her head off and stuff her remains into an oven. Hard enough to bludgeon another woman -- his girlfriend -- to a pulp with a brick and dump her body four floors down a ventilation shaft.
Hard enough to spurn his grizzled communist defense attorney, who recognizes Bigger's murderous intransigence in the end, his courtroom elegance giving away to stammering disbelief in the face of what America has created, what it will continue to create after Bigger is executed.
Things have changed since the 40s, to be certain. In fact, I even found myself working under a black man for a day as I read this book. His job was to follow me around and gauge my efficiency.
It sounds worse than it was -- I've grown accustomed to being demeaned myself, I guess. And, happy corporate cog that I am, I am exceptionally efficient, so I have nothing in the short-term to worry about and dutifully jump through my assigned hoop because I have a wife and a child and a mortgage and a college loan andandand. As my shift progressed, this stranger and I inevitably started to connect on a human level and social and work barriers grew less opaque.
When the time arrived for us to drive to an area infamous for its racism , I told him about it because he was from out of town. I told him how I had managed a liquor store there years ago and transferred one of my clerks, an African-American woman, because she had been threatened on the job by a skinhead.
I told him about how I had had to call building maintenance to paint over assorted white power graffiti, most notably a swastika, on the company building there. I told him how I had once pulled up in front of the office at midnight and looked across the narrow, two-lane street to see a family of white trash -- father, mother, pre-pubescent boy -- huddled together on a lawn as a garden hose dangled from the father's hands, the lot of them staring at me in a scene reminiscent of American Gothic, and feeling for days afterwards how fragile the flame of civilization is.
I told him how when we had an African-American co-worker, it was understood that she wasn't allowed to travel to the office alone. When we arrived there, I did my thing and it was time for lunch. I had a momentary pang of dread as I took the book from my backpack, what with all this race bullshit ambient around the two of us.
When he asked me what I was reading and I told him, he responded simply, "Good book. Not because either of us intended it, but just because it was. Jan 28, ij rated it it was amazing Shelves: african-american , read , , classics , undergraduate-assignment , fiction. This book has compiled recommended books, primarily novels which were selected by over contributors literary critics, professors of literature, etc.
For each recommended book there is information on the author and a short blurb about the book. Jan 30, Nathan Paul rated it did not like it. While I realize some of the things that Wright is trying to say in this book, I could not bring myself to enjoy it at all. One of the main reasons was because I simply detested the main character, Bigger Thomas. The reason I disliked him so much was not because he is amoral; no, there are characters in books I like who are quite evil.
The reason I disliked him is because he did things that were completely pointless and he was also not a very deep or interesting character.
This book also dragged While I realize some of the things that Wright is trying to say in this book, I could not bring myself to enjoy it at all. This book also dragged on far too long in my opinion , and never gave the reader much reason to sympathize with the main character. Main characters do not have to be "good guys", of course, but they should at least be interesting! There was nothing about Bigger that made me curious to know why he became the type of person he was.
Of course, this book does have a good message in some ways about how racism can damage people both directly and indirectly. However, I think Wright should have created a more complex protagonist that the readers could have at least understood in some way. As a reader going through the book, I was aghast at the brutal descriptions of murder and coverup contained within the first two-thirds of the book. I don't normally read this sort to stuff.
Nevertheless, I recognize the book as a realistic depiction of the ravaged world of urban African Americans of the s published with repercussions remaining today. The story is told with the highly charged consciousness of an uneducated and embittered black man who has been radically cut off from t As a reader going through the book, I was aghast at the brutal descriptions of murder and coverup contained within the first two-thirds of the book.
The story is told with the highly charged consciousness of an uneducated and embittered black man who has been radically cut off from the mainstream of American life. It's a view of the ghetto from the standpoint of one of it victims. Feelings of anger and hate are described with visceral realism. It attacks the old taboo of mentioning the relationships between sex, race, and violence.
Then in the final third of the book the intermingling of the powers and promises of religion, capitalism, racism, and communism is explored with explicit thoroughness. The summary arguments of the defense counsel at the trial near the book's end is long and passionate in which the argument is made that the violent criminal acts of this defendant are products of our unfairly segregated society which predictably has led to anger and resentment.
The countering summary arguments by the prosecution are equally passionate maintaining the position of the blind justice in a nation of laws. The prosecution asks for death sentence. In those days things happened fast. Time before execution was only a couple weeks, and apparently there was not possibility of further appeals. Ironically, this life changing experience occurs shortly before his life is to be ended by execution.
The first conversation occurs before the trial when the attorney asks Bigger, "Tell me about yourself. After the trial is over there is a second conversation between the two in which Bigger strives to revisit these new feelings and insights. There's something about these conversations I find particularly poignant, but it's difficult to explain why. Could the tragedy of this story have been avoided if these sorts of conversations have occurred earlier?
Or is it the message of this book that these conversations cannot take place when needed because of society's structural flaws? Considering the year that this book was published in , the ideas explored in this book were particularly prophetic in light of the civil rights movement that appeared in the second half of the twentieth century.
View all 3 comments. Apr 19, Keertana rated it it was amazing Shelves: books-that-linger , classics. Yet, how many of us have truly had to put ourselves in the shoes of those people? Yet, Bigger stands for something bigger; he represents all of black America. Bigger has been recognized in life as a troubled boy, one who lashes out. His education is scarce and limited, his fear overwhelms him, and he constantly feels as if white people control his every move, his every action, his every thought.
Thus, these feelings and instincts have bubbled over to such an extent where he lashes out. He accidently smothers a white woman, chops off her head and throws her body in a furnace to burn.
He takes a brick and hits his girlfriend with it, throwing her down an air shaft to freeze to death — all after he has raped her. He blames his actions on a Communist, one of the few people helping him — the same Communist who ultimately finds him a lawyer. In the writing of Native Son, Wright walks a fine line. Bigger, despite being the main character of the novel is so hard to feel any sympathy for.
Wright has created a character who is black, who is oppressed, who is quite literally a victim of the society in which he lives, yet Bigger acts like a sociopath with animalistic instincts and no regret for the inhumane acts he commits.
However, Wright takes this view of Bigger, this interpretation of him, and turns it into something different: understanding. Wright describes the ongoing power struggles within this novel, mixed with the rising fear so perfectly, that you cannot help but be in awe of his skill. Although most readers will find Bigger to be a sociopath or cruel and unyielding at first, reading on we can see that he is truly a man being treated just like a caged animal.
In so many ways Native Son is such a difficult book to read. It took me nearly a month to finish it because of the time I took reading each chapter and more importantly, the reflection it caused me to have. It breaks my heart. Wright once said that, "'I must write this novel, not only for others to read, but to free myself of this scene of shame and fear.
It became something I had to do, I felt obliged to do. Dec 08, Thomas rated it really liked it Shelves: read-for-college , historical-fiction , adult-fiction. A powerful book about a young black man named Bigger Thomas who kills a white woman out of fear for his own life.
Richard Wright takes us to Chicago in the s, where Bigger just obtained a new job working as a chauffeur under the wealthy Dalton family. Mary Dalton, the family's luxurious daughter, and Jan, her communist boyfriend, treat Bigger well - a suspicious feat because Bigger has suffered tragedy all his life.
That night ends in tragedy when Bigger kills Mary in a claustrophobic space, A powerful book about a young black man named Bigger Thomas who kills a white woman out of fear for his own life.
That night ends in tragedy when Bigger kills Mary in a claustrophobic space, leading to a violent cycle he cannot escape. Wright does a fantastic job of showing many things: the political, economic, and interpersonal disadvantages faced by blacks, the way society will capitalize on dis-empowering the underprivileged, and the possible reclamation of self-governance that blacks can assert with effort and time.
However, I most appreciated his commitment to revealing the inner workings of Bigger's brain. He captures the psychological repercussions of racism and how prejudice contributes to Bigger's actions. Wright does not render Bigger likeable; rather, he uses Bigger's character as an exploration of externalized and internalized racism. The depth in which Wright writes Bigger's inner world reveals the fraught complexities inherent within an oppressed person's psyche.
Overall, another great read in my Social Protest Lit course, and recommended to those interested in the psychology and sociology of race relations. The suspense made my heart race even though I knew what was going to happen. I found myself holding my breath and clenching my fist; the description about how Bigger was feeling was so vivid.
The subject matter was a lot to swallow but I see why this novel is a classic; the description of racism was enough to change the world. Shelves: anti-heroes , modern-classic , american-literature , books-to-read-before-you-die , race-relations , s , poc-author , poc-protagonist , chicago.
Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son , is a shiftless, bullying, vulgar young man who begins the book tormenting his poor mother, goes to a billiards club to plan a robbery with his equally ne'er-do-well friends, then he and one of his friends goes to a movie theater to masturbate in the seats.
He ends the book accused of the capital rape and murder of a white girl, whom he did murder but did not in fact rape , but by his own words to his lawyer, makes clear that raping her was something Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son , is a shiftless, bullying, vulgar young man who begins the book tormenting his poor mother, goes to a billiards club to plan a robbery with his equally ne'er-do-well friends, then he and one of his friends goes to a movie theater to masturbate in the seats.
He ends the book accused of the capital rape and murder of a white girl, whom he did murder but did not in fact rape , but by his own words to his lawyer, makes clear that raping her was something he might have done, if the circumstances had been only slightly different.
In other words, Bigger Thomas is the Big Scary Negro personified, a nightmare manifestation of white America's racial fears. And that was Richard Wright's point. He wasn't trying to make Bigger Thomas sympathetic as an individual. He was, as he explains in my edition's afterword "How 'Bigger' was Born" trying to show how American society creates Biggers.
Written in , Native Son describes a pre-Civil Rights Act America in which segregation was still the law of the land and political correctness had not yet banished "boy" and "nigger" from polite discourse. But Wright the grandson of slaves was not addressing anything as simple as segregation or racial epithets. In the interior monologues of his protagonist, he spells out the alienation and hostility of men like Bigger, and comparisons with today's society, with a prison-industrial complex that exists largely to incarcerate black men, are hard to avoid.
Richard Wright was apparently a novelist of the naturalist school, and his writing has been criticized for its lack of imagery or style and a tendency towards polemics. There are a lot of monologues and speeches in Native Son , particularly in the closing arguments of Bigger's trial, which take up most of the second half of the book.
Bigger's defense attorney, Max, a Jewish communist as the prosecutor points out repeatedly , eloquently and at length presents what is essentially a "society made him do it" argument.
In him and men like him is what was in our forefathers when they first came to these strange shores hundreds of years ago. We were lucky. They are not. We found a land whose tasks called forth the deepest and best we had; and we built a nation, mighty and feared. We poured and are still pouring our soul into it.
But we have told them: 'This is a white man's country! Despite its thickness and its soapboxing, I did not find Native Son at all boring, and it was powerful because when Wright describes Bigger's alternating feelings of shame, alienation, reflexive hostility, crushed capacity to dream, and inability to express any of this even to the most helpful of white men, it all rang plausibly to me.
Bigger Thomas's murder of Mary Dalton is a horrible tragedy. She was innocent, he is guilty, and yet even the situation that led to her death is a multilayered disaster of racial fear and guilt and misunderstanding. I had not previously read any of the works of Richard Wright, one of the most prominent African-American writers of the 20th century.
His biography is interesting to say the least, as he mingled with a Who's Who of the early 20th century cultural scene - W. He was a member of the Communist Party, but became disenchanted and broke with them not long after Native Son was published.
I don't know if this is the definitive book about the Black Experience. Apparently many of Wright's critics think he did a rough cut of ground covered better by Ralph Ellison and others, and the communist influences are, while not completely intrusive, noticeable. Native Son reminded me most strongly of the social novels of Upton Sinclair, who likewise could tell a good story even while being completely unsubtle about his cause. But whereas Sinclair was a muckraker and a rabble-rouser, Wright, I think, saw himself as trying to sound an alarm bell.
An alarm bell that still may not have been heard. View 1 comment. Jun 11, Vince Will Iam rated it it was amazing Shelves: african-american-slave-narrative , to-read-in Infuriatingly brilliant! He hates Mary, and is afraid of her, but she is attractive and is negligent about sexual decorum, and the combination ought to provoke some sort of sexual reaction; yet in the familiar edition it does not. Now we can see that, originally, it was meant to.
He repeats intentionally with Bessie what he has done, for the most part unpremeditatedly, to Mary: he takes her upstairs in an abandoned building, kills her by crushing her skull with a brick, and disposes of her body by throwing it down an airshaft.
But before Bigger kills Bessie he rapes her, and if the scene is to carry its full power we have to have felt that when Bigger was with Mary in her bedroom he had rape in his heart. Wright was a writer of warring impulses. His rage at the injustices of the world he knew made him impatient with the usual logic of literary expression. He was a gifted inventor of morally explosive situations, but once the situations in his stories actually explode he can never seem to let the pieces fall where they will.
His novels suffer from an essentially anti-novelistic condition: they are hostage to a politics of outcomes. Wright tries to order events to fit his sense of justice—or, more accurately, his sense of the impossibility of justice—and when the moral is not unambiguous enough he inserts a speech. At the same time, Wright loved literature intimately, as you might love a person who has rescued you from misery or danger. Literature, he said, was the first place in which he had found his inner sense of the world reflected and ratified.
Everything else, from the laws and mores of Southern apartheid to the religious fanaticism of his own family he grew up mostly in the house of his maternal grandmother, a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, who believed that storytelling was a sin , he experienced as pure hostility. After he moved to Chicago, he discovered in Marxism a second corroboration of his convictions, and he joined the Communist Party. But he believed that Marxist politics were compatible with a commitment to literature—and the belief led, in , to his break, and subsequent feud, with the Party.
He had an appreciation not only of those writers whose influence on his own work is most obvious—Dostoyevski and Dreiser and, later on, Camus and Sartre—but also of Gertrude Stein, Henry James, T.
Eliot, Turgenev, and Proust. His novels tend to be prolix and didactic, and his style is often dogged. But force is a literary quality, too—and one that can make other limitations seem irrelevant.
It is not a position that Wright would have accepted. His models were the great modern writers nearly all of them white , and he wanted to serve art in the same spirit they had. What Wright took to be his good fortune was also his dilemma. Poe was, in a sense, the luckier writer. He is about five feet, nine inches tall and his skin is exceedingly black. His lower jaw protrudes obnoxiously, reminding one of a jungle beast.
His arms are long, hanging in a dangling fashion to his knees. His shoulders are huge and muscular, and he keeps them hunched, as if about to spring upon you at any moment.
He looks at the world with a strange, sullen, fixed-from-under stare, as though defying all efforts of compassion. All in all, he seems a beast utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization. In speech and manner he lacks the charm of the average, harmless, genial, grinning southern darky so beloved by the American people. The passage may strike readers today as a case of moral overloading—a caricature of attitudes whose virulence we already acknowledge.
For the Wright who wanted to expose an evil that other writers had ignored, the starkness of his material made his job simpler; for Wright the novelist, the same starkness made it harder. It is simply criminal. He therefore introduced into his novel a character who has never, I think, won a single admirer: Mr.
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