A Book Review of Native Son

A Book Review of Native Son by Richard Wright

Strong interest in Wright 's life , his work , and his influence continues in the 1980s and 1990s , although with not quite the same emphasis as in the preceding four decades . The focus of attention has shifted somewhat with studies of Wright 's political vision diminishing and analyses of his craftsmanship and literary sources increasing . The great majority of scholars and critics during this period are in general agreement about the centrality of Wright 's position in African-American letters and his great importance in

American and modern traditions , although some reappraisal of a negative sort has also developed , especially among those expressing dissatisfaction with Wright 's portrayal of female characters . And with the publication in 1991 of the Library of America editions of Wright 's major work , the critical response to Wright has entered an important new phase in which fundamental questions are now being raised about which texts are the most authentic representations of Wright 's actual intentions and which texts are highest in literary quality

Wright 's achievement in Native Son was not only to project the experience of American black people , in all its raw brutality but also to form it into a rich , coherent , balanced vision of life . Wright attracted in some ways to Western culture because of its tradition of Enlightenment rationalism that promises political freedom to oppressed people . Wright was deeply suspicious of other aspects of the West especially its history of racism . Although characters like Bigger Thomas are initially described as alienated from both self and community , they experience genuine selfhood and become a participant in the life of the spirit by establishing kinship with others . I envision Bigger Thomas as caught between these two opposite qualities of Western culture , for he is both victimized by Western racism and also achieves selfhood in a very Western way through revolutionary will , individualism and self consciousness (p . 311

The slum conditions of the South Side so vividly portrayed in Native Son had been the daily reality of a decade in Wright life ( 1927- 1937 . He had lived in a cramped and dirty flat with his aunt , mother , and brother . He had visited hundreds of similar dwellings while working as an insurance agent . The details of the Chicago environment in the novel have a verisimilitude that is almost photographic . The Ernie 's Kitchen Shack ' of the novel , located at Forty-Seventh Street and Indiana Avenue , for example , is a slight disguise for an actual restaurant called The Chicken Shack ' 4647 Indiana Avenue , of which one Ernie Henderson was owner . Similar documentary accuracy is observed throughout the book

Wright drives his story forward at a furious yet skillfully controlled pace . The full drama is unfolded in just about two weeks . There is first of all the prophetic killing of a rat in the room where Bigger , his mother , his sister and his brother live in quarreling , desperate squalor . Then Bigger , who has a bad name as a braggart living by shady devices , goes out to meet the poolroom gang environment provides . He plans a hold-up he is afraid to carry out . To hide his cowardice he terrorizes one of his friends

You see his character . That is the point . Wright is champion of a race not defender of an individual wrongdoer . Bigger gets a job as chauffeur in the house of Mr . Dalton , who is a philanthropist toward Negroes and owner of many Negro tenements . Mary Dalton , the daughter of the house and her friend Jan , a supernally noble radical , make him drink with them . Through an accident , Bigger kills Mary Dalton . That is the first murder . There is a gruesome dismemberment to hide the crime . Bigger thinks of demanding money , and makes his girl , Bessie , help him . His crime is discovered . After that there is the flight , the second murder deliberate and brutal , the manhunt spreading terror over the whole South Side , then the spectacular capture and the day of reckoning in court for all concerned

Apart from the ideas that give it volume , force and scope , Native Son has some magnificently realized scenes : in the early part , where Bigger a stranger and afraid , as Houseman said , in a world he never made gropes for freedom from the walls that hold him in the flight across the roofs and the stand high over the world , in the jail where processions of people come to see him , at the inquest and in the howling mob outside the court . The measure in which it shakes a community is the measure of its effectiveness

In Wright 's case , Bigger Thomas is his fictional formulations of one term of the black-white juxtaposition , of the Afro-American orientation per se , as well as of the tragic problem . As Burke and others have observed , Native Son is the development of consciousness from the unreflecting grasp of self and emotions to an increased near-conceptual grasp of them a development set forth in the image of the cornered rat at the beginning and the image of the highly articulate , yet still somewhat obtuse , Max at the end , as well as in the image of Bigger What I killed for ' says Bigger , indicating , even at the end , his uncertainty as to what he wanted , what new orientation he hoped to establish . What he did establish the killings , the kidnap plot , calling a tune to which Chicago dances - is an erroneous orientation , a wrong interpretation of the way things are linked . It will , therefore , not lead to the fulfillment of the something ' that makes Bigger tick Nevertheless , it must 've been good ' for it ' was both himself and the making of himself - I am (p . 263 . The criterion of its goodness position , neither short story nor essay , in which he attempts to express the sensations of an organism less conscious or articulate than even Bigger Thomas - a seed potato dissolving underground , its rot the other side of its act of giving life to new plants

Essentially , Bigger Thomas is a conscious composite portrait of a number of individual Negroes Wright had observed over the years . In that remarkable exercise in self-examination , how Bigger was born , Wright sketched five such Bigger prototypes he had known in the South . All of them were rebellious defers of the crow , and all of them suffered for their insgenerally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken (p . 245 . In Chicago , especially when Wright worked at the South Side Boys ' Club in the middle thirties , he observed other examples of the Bigger Thomas type - fearful , restless , moody , frustrated , alienated violent youths struggling for survival in the urban jungle

In to assess properly the meaning of the final section , it is necessary to understand what happens in the concluding pages of the novel . The point is that Bigger , through introspection , finally arrives at a definition of self which is his own and different from that assigned to him by everyone else in the novel . The many instances in the last of the three sections of the novel which show him exploring his deepest thoughts , feelings and emotions reveal Baldwin 's statement to be patently false . Shortly after Bigger 's capture and imprisonment he lies thinking in his cell . The two perspectives of Bigger Thomas contained in the novel exist in tension until in the final pages the focus shifts away entirely from the social emphasis . No matter what the social implications are , the fact is that he , the private , isolated human must face the consequences . It is no wonder that Bigger is understand Max 's speech during the trial . He grasps something of the tone , but the meanings of the words escape him , for Max is not really thinking about Bigger the existential person , the discrete human entity When Bigger and Max converse privately , they understand each other reasonably well . But during the trial Max is talking about a symbol , a representative figure . Hence the significant problem becomes not whether Max will save Bigger - the answer to that question is a foregone conclusion - but whether Bigger will save himself in the only possible way , by coming to terms with himself . This we see him doing as we observe him during long , solitary hours of minute introspection and self-analysis

All of Bigger 's life is controlled , defined by his hatred and his fear And later , his fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape he dies , having come , through this violence , we are told , for the first time , to a kind of life , having for the first time redeemed his manhood For it is clear enough that Bigger 's feeling of elation , of having done a creative thing simply in murdering is not the final outcome . It is rather early in the novel when he feels release , free from the forces which have all his life constrained him . But after his capture he feels he is not free he still has himself to cope with . His final feeling is not - as the concluding pages of the novel explicitly show - exaltation for having redeemed his manhood ' Very soon after the first murder to be sure , he does feel that it has had some redeeming effect

When Bigger has achieved the new humility ' the pride and dignity referred to there , if he has achieved it , it should be evidenced somewhere later in the novel . And so it is . During the final two pages of the novel , it is clear that Bigger no longer suffers , is no longer in terror about his impending death . Aw , I reckon I believe in myself .I ain 't got nothing else .I got to die (p . 258 . He accepts himself as never before , and in realizing his identity . He is able to evaluate his past actions objectively . I didn 't want to kill .But what I killed for , I am ! It must have been pretty deep in me to make me kill ! I must have felt it awful hard to murder (p . 263

Some novels - and not by any means , only great novels - have a kind of life of their own , a peculiar vitality amounts almost to independent being . They add something to the reader 's mind which was not there before , and which cannot be lost or taken away . Usually they father other books in turn and may end by coloring the thinking of a generation which has scarcely heard of them . Native Son , by Richard Wright , at a fair venture , is such a novel . Richard Wright 's cruel and absorbing story of a Negro boy from Chicago 's Black Belt leaves one with the feeling that never before , in fiction , has anything honest or important been written about the American Negro . The day Native Son appeared American culture was changed forever . No matter how much qualifying the book might later need , it made impossible a repetition of the old lies . Richard Wright 's novel brought out in the open , as no one had ever before , the hatred , the fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture . Native Son is not only a major document of the American racial dilemma but also a book whose art makes it an important American novel

Works Cited

Wright , Richard . Native Son . Perennial : Unabridged edition . January 1987

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