Academic Literature Analysis: Richard Wright's The Native Son

The Native Son - Literature Analysis Paper

Close analysis of Native Son reveals that Wright's construction of Bigger as a colonized native engaged in the struggle for freedom and self definition subscribes to the theory of blackness versus whiteness put forth by Fanon. For Fanon, there is on the part of the native a psychological need to face the white man as an equal. This requires the use of the white man's tools of oppression and the ability to find a designated innocent enemy against whom all the aggressivity inspired by the oppressive system is directed. This behavior pattern, as Fanon explains, allows the native to discard the white man as the real source of his misery and to find scapegoats among his own kind. By doing so, the native/black person creates a mental shield which allows him to bolster the inevitable resistance to whiteness. It is precisely because the black man can resist the white world that politics and identity in the United States have revolved around separatism. Paradoxically, however, the attractions of whiteness often propel the black man towards whiteness and hence, the politics of identity in the United States are founded upon two polar opposites - assimilation and resistance. Fanon's theory shall be explored in relation to Richard Wright's The Native Son.

Before Fanon theorised blackness versus whiteness, resistance versus temptation, Native Son had already constructed a character, Bigger Thomas, to actualise these duelling tendencies. Seeing his life defined and determined by the outside world, the only thing Bigger can do is to face this world in order to assert his own identity. Bigger's urge is in the tradition of what Anthony Dawahare calls the "racialised Oedipal struggle" (452) of Wright's male urban protagonists as they are psychologically caught between the impulse to act like black boys and submit to the powerful white father and resist/kill the white father. As Dawahare argues, these protagonists "seek to compensate for their socially conditioned feelings of impotence through fantasies of omnipotence, which are fed and formed by the logic of American racism, as well as the nationalistic and fascistic ideologies that flourished internationally in the 1930s" (452). Needless to say, the protagonists' mode of submission/assimilation and resistance is diverse, as it takes into consideration the reality of the national environment. In Native Son, Bigger vents his feeling of impotence through different forms of diverted resistance to, and assimilation with, his Manichean world including a "rat scene."

The way to the rat scene goes through Bigger's earlier frustration in the hands of a Manichean world. Bigger's outside world is organised in such a way that it constructs and forces upon him an unwilled identity. This world is divided into a white affluent world and a poor black world totally dependent upon the first one. The dominating white world is the world of the State's Attorney whose campaign bill board tells Bigger that "[He] Cannot Win." It is the world of the Daltons economic oppression that keeps Bigger and his family in the South Side, and behind the train tracks, away from the East Side of the Daltons' mansion. Bigger admits the authority of this world when he concedes that he "oughtn't think about it, " referring to this division of his world between wealthy whites and poor blacks living in different parts of the city (Wright, 20). Bigger, however, cannot help thinking this way. As Bigger confesses to Gus, he has the white man "right here in [his] stomach" (21). This image of the white man embedded in Bigger's personality alludes to his double consciousness, to assimilation versus resistance. It is an image that lays the grounds of Bigger's "colonial humanism" as Robert Young terms it. This colonial humanism is an anti-humanism since, as Young argues, contrary to the Enlightenment concept of an unchanging nature of man that offers itself as a model to others, this humanism rejects models by asserting man as the product of himself and his activity in history.

Fanon shares this Manichean world, where the white man's physical division of the world between a black and a white zone is at the basis of the black man's character. By living in a world in which he is physically limited in space and life as to where he can go and what he can do, the black man becomes a product of whiteness. It is true that like Bigger's world, the white man's world, for Fanon, is a world of overwhelming power protected by the police and the army. Fanon's black man knows, however, that the white system dominates his world and is at the heart of the oppression he suffers In this context, skin colour is equated with economic ability and vice versa. This is true with Bigger up to a certain point since the colour code remains relevant in his world. What sets Bigger apart and further complicates his approach to self-actualisation is that the white system that dominates him is physically here to stay. Unlike Fanon's native who fights for liberation, Wright's native knows that he cannot.

Although he has to put up with the identity cast upon him by the outside world, Bigger finds ways of resisting this world and, therefore, the identity it casts upon him. Despite the State's Attorney's big and bold poster declaring his doomed failure, Bigger's reply resists the posted message: "`you crook' he mumbled shaking his head. 'You let whoever pays you off win'" (13). But Bigger knows, as he tells his friend Gus, that he would not even have enough money to get drunk and sleep off his problems with the white world. In fact, Bigger would love, as he muses before the poster, to be "in [the State's Attorney's] shoes for just one day" (13). He, then, would "never have to worry again" (13). Thus, Bigger asserts that he is colonised but not conquered. Bigger, as the narrator reveals, is ready to do anything as long as what he does helps him "evade looking ... squarely at this problem" of his responsibility vis-a-vis the white man (17). But, Bigger includes the impossible event of "being" the white man. Such a thought prefigures Bigger's upcoming mind development since being in the white man's "shoes" is a way of getting rid of him. Bigger furthers this thought when he tells his friend, Gus, that they are made to live in one corner of the city and are never allowed to fly planes or run ships. Bigger knows that such activities are exclusively reserved for the white man and that his idea of flying planes is, to say the least, as radical as a change of skin colour. Such a claim would, indeed, be detrimental both to the very essence of the white man's status and to Bigger's own existence since, as he tells Gus, Bigger would have taken along a couple of bombs and dropped them on the world he hates. Bigger's target would presumably be the world of the white man. But, tangled with the white man's world as he is, Bigger knows that targeting it is targeting his own world. Bigger knows this but is determined to put up with anything as long as it disqualifies the overwhelming agency of the white man. But Bigger knows that he does not have the means for his grand ambition of "erasing" the white man.

In the final analysis, the drive towards both assimilation and resistance is expressive of Dubois' `double consciousness.' The black man resists the white man while, simultaneously aspiring towards assimilation in the white world. This is clarified even more when Bigger and Gus "play white." They want whiteness but, at the same time, mock it. they express this itch for upward social mobility characterizing the phase. Their whiteness is fictional, but the act helps the reader envision that being white may take the form of a role-play that Bigger and his friend are gifted enough to perform. There is a touch of satisfaction in the way Bigger seals the end of their act. When Bigger concludes "that's just the way they talk" (19), the personal pride he takes in his performance goes beyond a mere role play. Indeed Bigger seems to be saying that they can be white, can assimilate but, will remain black and will resist.

References

Dawahare, Anthony. "From No Man's Land to Motherland: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels." African American Review 3 (Autumn 1999): 451-466.

Du Bois, W. E. B. "Of Our Spiritual Starvings." From The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Gramercy Books; 1994.

Fanon, Frantz. "The Fact of Blackness." From Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 1998.

Young, Robert. White Mythologies. Writing and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.