Responding to Critical Literature

Richard Wright

Bigger and his family: 

- What is the dynamic between Bigger and the members of his family? How do they get along? How do they cope with living in a cramped apartment?

- Why is Bigger so angry? Are his siblings as angry at everything?

- Why is Bigger so resistant to the idea of getting a job (especially a job offered through Relief)? Why does he need the job (according to his mother)?

Bigger and his friends:

- How do Bigger and Gus get along on 15-22 (when they are outside smoking)? What interests them? What do they claim limits them and restricts their responsibilities? Gus: "'If you wasn't black and if you had some money and if they'd let you go to that aviation school, you could fly a plane'" (17). 

- Who do Bigger and Gus imitate while playing white on 18-19? Why do they choose to imitate these people?

- Do Bigger and Gus feel the same way about the social limitations placed on blacks by whites?

- What is the big "haul" (24) that Bigger and his friends have discussed for so long (23-7)? Why are they afraid to this job?

- Why does Bigger lash out so violently at his friends? Why is he so restless? (25-8, 36-9). 

- Why doesn't their plan work out? Was it really too late (41-2)?

Bigger's fantasies:

- Why is Bigger so interested in Mary Dalton? What opportunities do his ideas of her (when he sees her in the newsreel) suggest to him? (31-4).

Critical conversation -- Baldwin's "Many Thousands Gone"

"As for this New Negro, it was Wright who became his most eloquent spokesman; and his work, from its beginning, is most clearly committed to the social struggle. Leaving aside the considerable question of what relationship precisely the artist bears to the revolutionary, the reality of man as a social being is not his only reality and that artist is strangled who is forced to deal with human beings solely in social terms; and who has, moreover, as Wright had, the necessity thrust on him of being the representative of some thirteen million people. It is a false responsibility (since writers are not congressmen) and impossible, by its nature, of fulfillment. The unlucky shepherd soon finds that, so far from being able to feed the hungry sheep, he has lost the wherewithal for his own nourishment: having been allowed -- so fearful was his burden, so present his audience! -- to recreate his own experience" (32-33).

What is the issue Baldwin has with Native Son? Do you agree? Is Bigger a convincing character? Is he intended to be representative of the plight of blacks in the United States?

"Native Son begins with the Brring! of an alarm clock in the squalid Chicago tenement where Bigger and his family live. Rats live there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first encounter Bigger in the act of killing one...Bigger's situation and Bigger himself exert on the mind the same sort of fascination. The premise of the book is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: We are confronting a monster created by the American republic and we are, through being made to share his experience, to receive illumination as regards the manner of his life and to feel both pity and horror at his awful and inevitable doom. This is an arresting and potentially rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if Wright's execution had been more perceptive and if he had not attempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social terms.

What does it mean to "redeem a symbolical monster in social terms"?

"One may object that it was precisely Wright's intention to create in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social disease and prophetic of disaster. I think, however, that it is this assumption which we ought to examine more carefully. Bigger has no discernable relationship to himself, to his own life, to his own people, nor to any other people -- in this respect, perhaps, he is most American -- and his force comes, not from his significance as a social (or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation of a myth" (34-5).

"Despite the details of slum life which we are given, I doubt that anyone who has thought about it, disengaging himself from sentimentality, can accept this most essential premise of the novel for a moment. Those Negroes who surround him, on the other hand, his hard-working mother, his ambitious sister, his poolroom cronies, Bessie, might be considered as far richer and more subtle and accurate illustrations of the ways in which Negroes are controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have evolved for their survival.

Did you find these characters more compelling than Bigger? Are they more representative of general social conditions?

We are limited, however, to Bigger's view of them, part of a deliberate plan which might not have been disastrous if we were not also limited to Bigger's perceptions. What this means for the novel is that a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life. What the novel reflects -- and at no point interprets -- is the isolation of the Negro within his own group and the resulting fury of impatient scorn. It is this which creates its climate of anarchy and unmotivated and unapprehended disaster; and it is this climate, common to most Negro protest novels, which has led us all to believe that in Negro life there exists no tradition, no field of manners, no possibility of ritual or intercourse...But the fact is not that the Negro has no tradition but that there has as yet arrived no sensibility sufficiently profound and tough to make this tradition articulate. For a tradition expresses, after all, nothing more than the long and painful experience of a people; it comes out of the battle waged to maintain their integrity or, to put it more simply, out of their struggle to survive" (36).

"The sense of how Negroes live and how they have so long endured is hidden from us in part by the very speed of the Negro's public progress...Bigger, in the meanwhile, and all his furious kin, serve only to whet the notorious national taste for the sensational and to reinforce all that we now find necessary to believe. It is not Bigger whom we fear, since his appearance among us make our victory certain. It is the others, who smile, who go to church, who give no cause for complaint, whom we sometimes consider with amusement, with pity, even with affection -- and in whose faces we sometimes surprise the merest arrogant hint of hatred, the faintest, withdrawn, speculative shadow of contempt -- who make us uneasy; whom we cajole, threaten, flatter, fear; who to use remain unknown, though we are not (we feel with both relief and hostility and with bottomless confusion) unknown to them. It it out of our reaction to these hewers of wood and drawers of water that our image of Bigger was created.

How does this idea connect with the invisible man's yessing them to death and destruction?

"It is this image, living yet, which we perpetually seek to evade with good works; and this image which makes of all our good works an intolerable mockery.

Consider Bigger's reluctance to accept a Relief job.

The "n-----," black, benighted, brutal, consumed with hatred as we are consumed with guilt, cannot be thus blotted out. He stands at our shoulders when we give our maid her wages, it is his hand which we fear we are taking when struggling to communicate with the current 'intelligent' Negro, his stench, as it were, which fills our mouths with salt as the monument is unveiled in honor of the latest Negro leader. Each generation has shouted behind him, N-----! as he walked our streets; it is he whom we would rather our sisters did not marry; he is banished into the vast and wailing outer darkness whenever we speak of the 'purity' of our women, of the 'sanctity' of our homes, of 'American' ideals. What is more, he knows it. He is indeed the 'native son' : he is the 'n-----.' Let us refrain from inquiring at the moment whether or not he actually exists; for we believe that he exists. Whenever we encounter him amongst us in the flesh, our faith is made perfect and his necessary and bloody end is executed with a mystical ferocity of joy....

"And there is, I should think, no Negro living in America who has not felt, briefly or for long periods, with anguish sharp or dull, in varying degrees and to varying effect, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred, who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as that dust into which he himself has been and is being trampled; no Negro, finally, who has not had to make his own precarious adjustment to the 'n-----' who surrounds him and to the 'n----' in himself"