Grommersoft

By: Margara Averbach 

In the following essay, Averbach, a writer and translator with a doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires, illuminates Wright’s motivations for writing the novel and discusses the strategies the author uses to express his themes.

In 1940, when Native Son was published, African Americans already had an impressive tradition of poetry and essay writing, but Richard Wright’s work was the first critically significant novel by a black author in the United States. The subject of Native Son was quite a shock for many critics and writers. Some black critics protested because, according to them, the book was doing exactly what should not be done: showing white people that their prejudices against black men were true. Those critics believed black writers should only write about cultured, refined black people, so as to show the white world that blacks could be trusted, that they were capable of achieving the same things white middle class people could achieve. Wright wanted to do just the opposite: he wanted to show white America what black life was about, and that most black persons in America were not middle class. As he wrote in "How ‘Bigger’ Was Born," Wright was interested in the lives of people who told him: "I wish I didn’t have to live this way, I feel like I want to burst."

Now, if we say Native Son was written to prove or show something, we are talking about a very special class of literature: "literature engage" or "politically committed literature." Literature has many definitions. To consider literature as a means to change the world around us is one way to define it. Richard Wright defined literature this way; therefore he wanted his ideas to be clear to his audience. He devised a form that would allow him to explain himself. The reader should try to understand that form before he or she passes on to the details of the novel.

The novel is divided into three sections: "Fear," "Flight," and "Fate." The first two sections tell the story of Bigger Thomas’s crime and his arrest. If the novel were a thriller (and it has some elements of a thriller: the crime and the investigation are only two of them), this would be the end of the story. But for Richard Wright’s purpose, the most important part of the novel is still missing. In "Fate" Wright introduces a lawyer named Max. Max’s role is to explain the meaning of "Fear" and "Flight," not only to the reader but also to Bigger himself. A critic who despises politically committed literature would say that such explanations should be left to the mind of the reader. But if one wants to transmit certain ideas to the world in a novel, sometimes it is necessary to put those ideas into words.

The presentation of ideas makes this part of the novel very essay-like, but Wright manages to make it fiction through two devices. The first one is the use of the trial itself. Trials are important in American fiction: they impose a form of narration. They can be used as a means of manipulating the reader’s emotions. One goes on reading because one wants to know whether the jury will say "guilty" or "not guilty." A writer can also use a lawyer as his spokesman. In the story the lawyer explains and analyzes his client’s actions. He is required to do so within what we call a "realistic" presentation of fiction (that is, a narrative in which the writer tries to convince the reader that the actions taking place could really happen). The lawyer’s analysis and explanations are, as we say, "justified." Richard Wright wanted to explain Bigger Thomas’ actions from his point of view, and a lawyer was a good device to voice those explanations.

The second device has to do with the "psychological" presentation of fiction. In "Fate," Wright is interested in the mental changes undergone by Bigger. Max’s explanations help Bigger understand himself. In the first two parts of the novel, Bigger does not know who he is. At the end of "Fate," he still does not know, but he has begun to think deeply about it. He is beginning to understand himself, and the explanations are part of this change; they are "justified" also in that sense.

When he wrote the novel, Wright was a communist. He thus analyzes Bigger’s case and the role of society in it from a Marxist point of view. Yet he adds an ethnical dimension to Marxist ideas; that is why the Communist Party did not like the book, in spite of the fact that the communists (Jan and Max) play a very positive role in the novel.

Before leaving aside the general form of the novel, the character of Max should be looked at once more. In general, important characters are at least mentioned in the first pages of a novel. Yet Wright introduces Max only in the last third of his book. Max’s character is what the Greeks called a deus ex machina. In Greek comedy, if situations became complicated, the author introduced a magical character who could solve everything at the end. The device of the deus ex machina has been rejected by the novel as genre, especially in the twentieth century. That is why Max’s role in the novel may seem awkward to contemporary readers.

In "Fear" and "Flight," the story is told by an omniscient narrator. That is essential here because if Bigger Thomas does not understand himself, he cannot tell his story. Bigger is dominated by two forces: one is fear and the other is flight, the impulse to avoid problems. Before he kills, Bigger is a cornered animal, and as a cornered animal, he is violent and cruel. That is why the novel’s opening scene (Bigger killing a rat in his apartment) is so important. As Wright himself says in "How ‘Bigger’ Was Born", he wrote that first scene after he had finished the rest of the novel because he felt he needed a strong, powerful introduction to the story. The scene is a symbolic summary of the rest of the novel: the rat is a cornered animal, as Bigger and his family are. The rat and Bigger are violent with each other, as white and black people are. Psychologically, the scene shows Bigger’s tendency toward violence.

Bigger kills out of fear. After putting a drunken Mary Dalton to bed, he is about to be discovered in a very bad situation: alone with a helpless white girl in her bedroom. One of the stereotypes applied to black men is that they are attracted to white women and want to rape them. Bigger is so afraid of this image and its consequences that he kills Mary. But after the murder, he discovers he has finally accomplished something. He is in a way proud of the murder. This is an important point: society has forbidden Bigger to do almost everything. Now the horrid thing he has done gives meaning to his life because it is the only thing he could do. As he tells Max in the last book: "For a little while I was free. I was doing something. It was wrong, but I was feeling all right … I killed ’em ’cause I was scared and mad but I been scared and mad all my life and after I killed that first woman, I wasn’t scared no more for a little while."

Wright shows the reaction of several black characters to the pressure of white society. Like Bigger, these characters do not know what they want out of life. The most dramatic expression of this lack of dreams appears in "Fate." When Max asks Bigger what happiness would have been for him, Bigger answers: "I don’t know. It wouldn’t be like this." Bigger, his family, Bessie, and the men at the poolroom want something different from life, but they cannot imagine what it would be. Society does not even allow them to dream. They deal with this situation in different ways: Bigger, Gus, and Doc through violence; Bigger’s mother through religion; Bessie through alcohol. There seem to be no good choices for black people (religion is not shown as a positive force in this book). This is what makes Max cry in the last scene. Before he is sentenced, Bigger does not have time to learn how to dream something for himself. In that sense, the novel is deeply pessimistic.

If Wright wanted to show the conditions of blacks in the United States, he also had to describe whites’ ideas and attitudes towards the blacks. He presents a whole catalog of white people’s reactions to black reality. Britten, the racist, is the most predictable character, but the most interesting are the liberals, the Daltons and Jan.

There is one important metaphor of the condition of white people in Native Son: blindness. Whites are blind, literally (Mrs. Dalton) and symbolically (Mr. Dalton and Jan are blind because they do not understand blacks, much less their own reactions to them). Blindness here means not seeing another person, or seeing only what you yourself want to see in another. Mrs. Dalton wants Bigger to go to school. School is not Bigger’s goal; it is Mrs. Dalton’s goal for Bigger. Mr. Dalton thinks he helps blacks, but he charges outrageous rents for rat-infested rooms. Mary and Jan believe they are kind to Bigger, but in "Fate," when Max tells Bigger that Mary was being kind to him, Bigger answers: "What you say is kind ain’t kind at all…. Maybe she was trying to be kind but she didn’t act like it." For black people like Bigger, whites are like the blind wall Bigger sees in his future: something that crushes them. Kindness does not change that.

Now, what is Wright’s diagnosis of this situation? As I said before, the ending seems pessimistic: "He (Bigger) heard the ring of steel against steel as a far door clanged shut." The sound symbolizes Bigger’s lost life. He will not have the opportunity to finish the process of selfunderstanding he has started. Yet there is a ray of hope, an indication of the difference between the early Bigger, the one who kills the rat, and the later one. In the last scene, Bigger says something important to Max: "Tell…. Tell Mister…. Tell Jan hello…." Jan has tried to make Bigger call him by his first name from Bigger’s first day at the Dalton’s. Bigger hated him for that. The fact that now he can call a white man "Jan" is a big step, from Wright’s point of view. That does not mean society recognizes this change and profits from it. On the contrary, society sentences Bigger to death. When one reads Native Son, one must reflect on these contradictions: they are part of the depth of a great novel about the black experience in America.

Source: Margara Averbach, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.