Native Son The novel Native Son, written by Richard Wright, is a book that
deals with a poor, black man named Bigger Thomas growing up in a rat-infested
one-bedroom apartment on the South Side in Chicago during the Depression. It
deals with the racism between blacks and whites, the poor and the rich. This man
Bigger Thomas feels like that he is trapped and doomed to a destiny of
constantly being on the bottom of the social ladder because of the whites. He
does not like the whites because he thinks of
as being masters or as being
people who tell the blacks what to do and where to go. He works as a chauffeur
for a family named the Daltons. But one night, as he is driving one of the
Daltons, Mary, the daughter, to go meet her Communist boyfriend Jan, the three
of
end up drinking and becoming drunk. Bigger drives Mary home and while
she is putting Mary into bed, Mary’s blind mother walks in to the room, and
Bigger becomes scared that Mary is gonna reveal Bigger’s presence so he smothers
her face with a pillow to make her be silent. But as he is doing that, he
accidentally kills her so he ends up burning her body in the furnace. He tries
to cover up the whole incident by trying to frame a kidnapping and ransom by
signing it “Red” to try to frame Jan, the boyfriend of Mary. But the family ends
up finding the bones in the furnace so they find Bigger, and the town sentences
him to death. Bigger was doomed from the beginning. He was a black man growing
up in a rich, white society. He knew that he was not going to become anything.
What I did not like about this book was how the author wrote from such a
pessimistic view of the whole blacks versus whites issue. He made is seem as if
you were black growing up in Chicago, that you were not ever going to become
anything, that you were doomed to say poor and live like rats. What I did like
is that, the author really showed how it was during the Depression era and what
the blacks had to go through. I like how he really tries to make the book relate
to everyone by having so many characters with such different personalities so
every person could learn from the book. I like how Wright shows that this man
Bigger Thomas was not a criminal from the very beginning. He shows how society
made him what he was, and there was nothing for him to do about it now that he
had done what he had done. I especially do enjoy how Wright showed that Bigger
was how he was by the way that he lived his life and how a person is not like he
is because he “born that way.” People are shaped by circumstances and instances
in a those people’s lives. I would recommend this book to anyone who would like
to read about the issues relating blacks versus whites or the whole prejudice
Bibliography
none
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