What makes bigger a native son

This only made the reality of his crime worse. Bigger now has to face the consequences of reality. Bigger panics and accidentally kills Mary while trying to keep her quiet so Mrs.

Dalton would not notice that he was in the room, too. When Mary's body is discovered people initially blame Jan, but as evidence is discovered, the facts point to Bigger and he flees.

He is soon caught and put on trial for murder. Throughout Bigger short life, he strives to find a place for himself in society, but he is unable to see through the prejudice and suppression that he encounters in those around him. The bleak harshness of the racist, oppressive society that the author, Richard Wright, presents the reader closes Bigger out as effectively as if society had sh He is from the lowest rung of the American social ladder of Depression-era Chicago: he is black, and he is poor.

He has been trapped his whole life by the white society, and he has a burning, eternal hate for them. White people made him live the life he lived. By not letting him become anything but a servant, they led him to a life of crime and hate. He himself experienced what white society's cruelty can do to a humble black family.

Because he was one of the victim, he craved for justice. Not just for himself, but for the sake of others who suffered as well. The roots of his heroism started with being the victim. In the story, Strout, the man who is shot, is clearly guilty but he is also a human being and that knowledge was suppressed by Fowler to kill him. At the end of the story Matt committed a kind of self murder by killing Strout. He is the judge, jury and the executioner which invites the readers to feel the anger and righteousness of the character.

There was, of course, a vague uneasiness about it all, but I would be able to handle that when I came to it. It would be simple. If anybody tried to kill me, then I would kill them first. And the reason is just because a black man was earning a lot of money and the white man became jealous. Also after this scene, there is an another example in Pg. Tom has sympathy for Mayella because he also knows her father was the guilty one.

Tom showing sympathy is just another good characteristic of his personality. 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. Max, the Communist lawyer who volunteers to represent Bigger at his trial. The speech is surely a mistake, but the error is not merely a formal one—putting a long sociological or philosophical disquisition into the mouth of a character.

Ivan Karamazov goes on at considerable length about the Grand Inquisitor, after all, and few people object. The consequence is an inner condition of fear and rage which everyone shares, and for which black men like Bigger are made the scapegoats. They carry on a rather broken conversation, at the end of which Bigger cries out:. But what I killed for, I am! I must have felt it awful hard to murder.

I feel all right when I look at it that way. Several times his body moved nervously, as though he were about to go to Bigger; but he stood still.

Just go and tell Ma I was all right and not to worry none, see? For what Bigger says and Max understands him perfectly well has nothing to do with negritude. It is that he has discovered murder to be a form of self-realization—that it has been revealed to him that all the brave ideals of civilized life, including those of Communist ideology, are sentimental delusions, and the fundamental expression of the instinct of being is killing.

Two years before Wright formally broke with the Communist Party, in other words, he had already turned in Marx for Nietzsche. But the Book-of-the-Month Club refused to publish the second part. It is a book about oppression in general, seen through three examples: the racism of Southern whites, the religious intolerance of Southern blacks, and the totalitarianism of the Communist Party.

The outsider is a black man, Cross Damon, who is presented with a chance to escape from an increasingly grim set of personal troubles when the subway train he is riding in crashes and one of the bodies is identified mistakenly as his.

Wright was always drawn to composing lurid descriptions of physical violence. Cross kills them, it is explained, because he recognizes in Communists and Fascists the same capacity for murder and contempt for morality he has discovered in himself.

Bigger is limited by the fact that he has only completed the eighth grade, and by the racist real estate practices that force him to live in poverty.

Furthermore, he is subjected to endless bombardment from a popular culture that portrays whites as sophisticated and blacks as either subservient or savage. When these feelings overwhelm him, he reacts with violence. Bigger commits crimes with his friends—though only against other blacks, as the group is too frightened to rob a white man—but his own violence is often directed at these friends as well. Bigger feels little guilt after he accidentally kills Mary.

In fact, he feels for the first time as though his life actually has meaning. Wright does not present Bigger as a hero to admire, but as a frightening and upsetting figure created by racism.