Native Son - Richard Wright [1]
For example, in his short story “Of the Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and in his novel Dark Princess (1928), W. E. B. Du Bois, probably the leading African American intellectual and polemicist of his day, had depicted young black heroes enraged by racism and literally striking whites who had offended them. Blacks had hailed Claude McKay’s 1919 sonnet “If We Must Die” as a call to militant self-defense against marauding whites. Jean Toomer’s modernist landmark Cane (1923) included one sketch in which a black man coolly kills a white man who draws a knife on him. However, such episodes were few and far between, and—with rare exceptions—virtually all of these black writers had placed at the center of their episodes of violence a protagonist of intelligence and sensitivity driven to an uncharacteristic act, a man of feeling from the black leadership class forced to act in ways otherwise beneath him. Not so with Wright in Native Son.
Bigger Thomas is decidedly of the poorest class, with no pretense to a sophisticated education, to anything more than rudimentary reading, or to ideals. Bigger is occasionally cunning, but there is little that is subtle about his intelligence or refined about his emotions. Knowing almost nothing about books or serious magazines, intellectually he is a creature of the movie house, where he is an easy prey to fantasies concocted by Hollywood for the gullible. He despises religion; appeals to religious faith either bore or enrage him. Estranged from his family, he is remote even from his mother; he has apparently grown up without his father, who is never mentioned in Native Son. Wright sets the tone for the depiction of Bigger Thomas in the first scene of the novel when he pits him physically against a rat that terrorizes the family. Bigger wins this battle, but not without a loss of dignity from which he barely recovers by the end of the book.
Although American literature had witnessed cameo appearances by renegade blacks (examples of the “bad nigger,” as Sterling A. Brown called one of the main literary stereotypes of African American character), no one quite like Bigger Thomas had ever been seen before the publication of Native Son. Nevertheless, one can locate at least some of the key elements of Bigger’s characterization in a broader literary tradition. Unmistakably behind Native Son, although in no way detracting from Wright’s personal achievement in creating the novel, is the tradition of naturalism, especially urban naturalism, in American writing as epitomized before Wright by novelists such as Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell. To such writers, the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath.
As Wright grew up in the South under the harsh conditions he would describe in his autobiography Black Boy (1945) and began to read fiction, he took readily to urban naturalism. For him, the road to Native Son had started with his first exposure to the major naturalists and realists. “All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel,” he declared in Black Boy, “and I could not read enough of them.” He was born in Mississippi in 1908, the first of two sons of a sharecropper who deserted his family when Richard was five or six. Soon after, his mother suffered paralytic strokes that left her dependent on her own mother, a devout religious fundamentalist and stern disciplinarian who apparently tried to crush Wright’s childhood interest in the world of the imagination. While his mother sank in he eyes into the embodiment of passivity and victimization, he found it almost impossible to forge warm ties with other human beings. For a while, Wright and his brother lived