CliffsNotes on Wright's Native Son by Lola Amis

Author:Lola Amis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Book III

FATE

Bigger has been caught and imprisoned, and even though he is as good as dead in the white man’s world, he is still, nevertheless, very much physically alive. His destruction is not accomplished until the end of Book III. Before that time, Bigger himself must be able to realize, at least partially, some of his own failures for which hitherto he has blamed society. At the same time, the reader must also be aware of certain concepts about Bigger’s psyche perhaps not quite so thoroughly discussed up to now.

Wright therefore allows Bigger to face some of the realities of life but, at the same time, does not destroy all of Bigger’s concepts about the evils of racism and its effects upon the black experience. To accomplish this, Wright devotes many pages of dialogue to the black-white dilemma; he introduces Max, a white Communist lawyer, into the plot to talk to Bigger. At this point, the action slows to a standstill as we listen to a sort of civil rights plea from Wright himself (as the lawyer). It is a plea to the white society in America during the 1930s that had pressed and imprisoned the black society into a hostile knot of fear and frustration. As such, it operates on two levels. It serves to show how whites shaped black Bigger. It also shows how Max and the Communist party were unable to accept Bigger as a person, as a human. To them, Bigger was only an object shaped by a capitalistic white society. In truth, however, both societies have no place for a black Bigger. It is not a thoroughly humanistic appeal that Max makes; it is a sociological appeal, in many ways no different from that offered by the Daltons.

Bigger is thrown into jail to await his fate, a fate which he realizes all too well is already sealed, but Bigger’s fate was sealed long before he was born: he was born black in a white-ruled society. He therefore sinks again behind his blank wall of illusion, his refuge. For three days he lies in a mental stupor, refusing to acknowledge anything. Having been forced all his life into a world of false estimates, false stereotypes, and false relationships, Bigger senses that his total impressions of that world will never be correct. He lies stagnant; to him, the sum total of his life is failure, failure even after he has murdered twice in order to find some kind of order and meaning to his life. Having killed twice in order to purge his soul of conflicts and issues brought on by inherent fears, he desires now to blot out himself and his whole existence.

However, when Bigger is confronted with the white crowd, his will to live springs up. This fortitude is typical of Wright’s protagonists; they always accept the challenge thrown at them. Big Boy, in the short story “Big Boy Leaves Home,” is told not to get his clothes. A white woman stands on them, daring

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