The Native Son - a Richard Wright's Novel - Research Paper Example

Wright and the Conditions of Men Any form of literature is a product of society. The written works - be it poetry, song or stories - they reflect and manifest what transpires in it, particularly the problems as well as the triumphs as much as the failures. This is the reason why many thinkers see literature as a tool in social criticism and analysis. This paper will examine Richard Wright’s novel, the Native Son, in this context. This novel has so effectively and realistically depicted the plight of African-Americans in modern America. Through the narrative and its characters, Wright was able discuss and illustrate several important themes not only about racial discrimination and other social issues that plague the African-Americans, but also about human nature, in general, its development or regression when factors such as oppression, inequality come into play. Background The novel, Native Son, was published in 1940 and its success established its author, Richard Wright, as one of the important modern literary figures and as a scholar who posited several important insights in regard to the social and political challenges that many African Americans face today. It was both critically acclaimed and a commercial hit as it sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks alone since it was released. (Foerstel 2002, 218) Its stage adaptation immediately followed afterwards, with glowing receptions from critics and audience alike. From its publication until today, amidst all the social, political and cultural upheavals, it has become one of America’s most esteemed literary works and still offering a timely and relevant critique on American society and the life of African Americans. Superficially, the Native Son is a story about Bigger Thomas and his life caught in downward spiral. He kills a white woman, then, his girlfriend in order to cover for murder, then a series of violence: the manhunt, gunfights, Bigger’s arrest, trial and surprising confession. The narrative was an exciting crime novel. Its complicated plot was deftly narrated by Wright and its characters carefully depicted so that the suspense was established and orchestrated at the right points, leading the readers to entertaining climax. On the other hand, the novel was more than this alone. It has more important dimensions, which this paper would aim to explore. Wright’s Experiences Reilly (1978) observed that Native Son is a novel that is very difficult to describe particularly in terms of conveying its real purpose and its real strength (39). However, when one examines the story of Wright’s life as well as the time of the book’s publication, there are numerous clues available that could certainly help the readers determine what the story is all about, what it wants to convey, the varying themes it sought to explain as well as the author’s intentions. In uncovering the gem in the Native Son, it is, hence, imperative to study Wright’s life, the society he lived in and the characters that drove the story from beginning to its end. According to Baker (1990), during his first fifteen years, Wright was nurtured on the values, modes of adaptation, patterns of social and religious organization, bitterness, aspirations, and violence of Southern black American folk, as he moved from Natchez to Memphis, from Memphis to Jackson, from Jackson to Elaine, Arkansas, and from Elaine back to Jackson (123). From 1927 to 1937 Wright’s family finally settled in Chicago and, there they lived in poverty, sharing a cramped and dirty shack – him, his mother, a brother and an aunt. He would later be better acquainted with the African-American plight when as an adult he became an insurance agent, mingling with the poor living in similar communities and circumstances. We saw Wright’s experiences reflected in the chapter of the novel, “How Bigger was Born”. The story told us that Bigger was, first, an insignificant migrant worker to the rich slumlord who employed him as a chauffeur and, second, as a hunted man across the cold and poor Chicago landscape.  As with the case of Wright, he was, a poor, twenty-year-old black man in 1930s Chicago (Wright 1940). He grew up under the harsh racial prejudice in 1930s America, and anger, fear, and frustration were his existence. Richard Wright himself was born on a farm in Mississippi and although he attended a parochial school, much like Bigger Thomas in “Native Son” he was rebellious. Illnesses that Wright’s mother suffered drained the family and forced him to work a number of jobs during his formative years, but despite sporadic schooling, he graduated valedictorian of his junior high school, but financial troubles worsened. Wright was forced to drop out of high school after only a few weeks to work. Just prior to the Great Depression, his family moved to Chicago, where Wright devoted himself seriously to writing.  The overall story-telling was outstanding, demonstrating Wright’s competence in handling a highly complicated mystery. But in the crisp and impressive dialogues, and the highly effective descriptive work achieved in depicting the characters, prejudice, landscapes and the judicial system, a clear fact is underscored: that Wright’s familiarity with Bigger’s experiences is not just because he is a Black man himself, but that as an African-American who has experienced and saw in other blacks the worst things ever experienced by his race during his time.  Writing about Bigger Thomas It was easy for Wright to write about Bigger, a man who belonged to the poorest class, with no claim to a good education, or to ideals, this man who could barely read the alphabet. Wright was able to successfully depict him as cunning, although lacking in subtlety in his emotions and intelligence. In short, he was a true unapologetically representative of a ghetto thug. The novel immediately tells us about him from the very first pages of the book. We can see the intimacy between Wright and the story he was telling through the details he was able to conjure, taking the reader with him, as if they are there witnessing the actual sequence of events. A case in point is the following passage: He walked to Dalton’s through the snow. His ring hand was in his coat pocket, his fingers about the kidnap note. When he reached the driveway, he looked about the street carefully… He walked up the steps and stood in front of the door. He waited a moment to see what would happen. So deeply conscious was he of violating dangerous taboo, that he felt the very air or sky would suddenly speak (Wright 173).  Wright’s readers are asked to occupy the place of Bigger, to be him in order to know, from the inside out, what it feels like to suffer from and to wage war against a society that considers him as nothing. Drawing from what he has experienced and what he saw in others, Wright forces us to see Bigger through an interesting perspective, and eventually understand the dynamics behind his personality, his hatred, his actions and motivations. According to Marriott, it is Wright’s strategy to generate sympathy as well as a therapeutic action against the violence of American social and cultural life (87). By having forced to drop out of school, Bigger was in and out of trouble at an early age, he is feared by those in his community, yet he fears whites like a force of nature so much so that he sabotages a robbery his gang had planned against them. Wright did not inoculate Bigger with any romantic traits that are common to most literary heroes. Instead, Bigger is a resentful product of his world. Bigger is a fusion of men Wright had himself known growing up in the South. “The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect” (Applebee 2007). In his depiction of Bigger, Wright demonstrated that he is emotionally drawn to Bigger and his quest more than his affinity to Marxist ideals. It must be underscored that the Native Son is also a protest novel - one that attempted to show how racial discrimination and class oppression destroyed Bigger Thomas. However, in the narrative, Bigger’s existential struggle for liberation seems to have won in. The result of this is clear when one considers the thought that, in the novel, if Bigger is liberated, the system does not defeat him and that if the system defeats him, he does not liberate himself. By pursuing the former, Wright abandoned his communist views. Here is a case in point: when he killed Mary and his girlfriend Bessie, he feels transformed: “He had murdered and created a new life for himself” (Wright 101). Here, it appears that he embraced the murders as some form of freeing himself from cultural stereotypes or racial degradation. This kind of freedom goes against the Marxist idea of liberation. A more explicit repudiation of the Marxist ideals was demonstrated in the character Jan, the Communist. By choosing Bigger to work on, he represented the political pity that blacks found more offensive than racial prejudice. All in all, according to Goldstein and Machor (2008), Wright, in Native Son, accepts that Bigger is a tragic victim of implacable social forces and the existential modernism in which the individual mind preserves it independence of conventional views (120). Conclusion The success of Native Son was surprising because it was enthusiastically received by the white-dominated American press. According to Gallantz (1985), this could be attributed to the continuing economic crisis and the great popularity of John Steinbeck’s social protest novels, which for their part had created a more positive cultural climate, paving the way for the positive response for the Native Son (5). Nonetheless, Bigger was an unconventional protagonist that shook and mesmerized its readers – white and black alike. This alone made Native Son a unique literary artifact in itself. With Native Son and Bigger Thomas, Wright did something that no other writer in black literature have undertaken previously: he created a genuine type of African American, a character with no hope and aspirations, made savage by the ghetto life, eventually emerging as one that harbors hate for a world that he did not perfectly understand. In Bigger, Wright did not conceive a saintly hero, a martyr or some ideal black protagonist favored by other writers. It turned out that his experiences allowed him to realistically create people, scenes and situations that truly reflect the case of African- Americans. There was the danger and actions that came with Bigger, which were difficult to comprehend, at least for the mainstream, white-dominated society. From its perspective, Bigger’s actions were shocking because, after all, he received a lot of goodwill from white patrons, from the community itself and in their minds should have been grateful for it. For Wright, however, this was not the case. A portion of the black population rebelling, just like what Bigger did, was a logical and a natural consequence of the black “American reconstruction” experience. Wright led us back to his experiences, through Bigger and his community, that showed how African-Americans were deprived of so much, land, the right to vote, the right to use public spaces, the right to live peacefully with equal rights and opportunities as any white men and women. The novel was Wright’s critique on racial discrimination. The only difference was that he was unapologetic of using Bigger and the things he did to highlight the injustice made on him. As a result, the novel was able to move its readers – both white and black – to broaden their imagination and be more accepting to the psychological problems of African Americans in society. In addition, there was an appreciable effort to extend sympathy that readers could finally understand and identify with. There are just so much insights in the Native Son that it educates not only the whites in America but also the blacks. For instance: for the former, there was their complicity on Bigger’s hate that claimed so much of the human tragedy that happened in the story. Confronted by racism and oppression and left with few options, many became antisocial and violent. They were disasters waiting to happen. For the latter, there was Bigger’s bitter realization that the breach existing between him and others drove the alienation that continuously erodes society. Works Cited Applebee, Flannery. How “Bigger” Was Born. March 29, 2007 Retrieved Apr. 4, 2010 from http://savannahnow.com/node/251792. Web. Baker, Houston. Long black song: essays in Black American literature and culture. University of Virginia Press, 1990. Booth, Allison, et al. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Portable Ed. New York: Norton, 2006. Print. Foerstel, Herbert. Banned in the U.S.A.: a reference guide to book censorship in schools and public libraries. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002. Gallantz, Michael. Richard Wright's Native Son & Black Boy. New York: Barron's Educational Series, Inc, 1985. Goldstein, Philip and Machor, James. New directions in American reception study. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Reilly, John. Richard Wright: the critical reception. Ayer Publishing, 1978. Marriott, David. Haunted life: visual culture and Black modernity. Rutgers University Press, 2007. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Doubleday, 1940. Read More