Richard Wright (1908-1960)

Native Son


Characters:

• Bigger Thomas
• Mr. Dalton
• Mary Dalton
• Boris A. Max
• Jan

Summary:

• Bigger Thomas is a poor uneducated 20-year old black man in 1930s Chicago. He sees a huge rat scamper across the room which he kills with a skillet.
• His mother pesters him to take a job with a rich white man Mr. Dalton, but Bigger chooses to meet up with his friends and plan a robbery of a white man's store. He sees whites not as individuals but as a natural oppressive force, a great looming "whiteness" pressing down upon him. His fear of confronting this force overwhelms him and he violently attacks a member of his gang to sabotage the robbery.
• As a result, Bigger ends up taking a job as chauffeur for the Daltons. Mr. Dalton is also Bigger's landlord. 
• On his first day at work, Bigger drives Mary, Mr. Dalton's daughter, to meet her communist boyfriend Jan. Mary and Jan force Bigger to take them to a restaurant and they all get drunk. Afterward, Mary is too drunk to make it to her bedroom on her own, so Bigger helps her up the stairs. Bigger begins to kiss Mary.
• Just as Bigger places Mary on her bed, Mary's blind mother enters the room. Bigger worries that Mary will reveal his presence so he covers her face with a pillow and accidentally smothers her to death. Mrs. Dalton, unaware that Mary is dead, prays over her daughter and returns to bed.
• Bigger tries to conceal his crime by burning Mary's body in the Dalton's furnace and tries to frame Jan for Mary's disappearance, playing on the Daltons' prejudice against communists. 
• Mary's murder giver Bigger a sense of power and his girlfriend Bessie inspires him to try to collect ransom money from the Daltons, as they only think she is vanished, not dead. However Mary's bones are eventually found in the furnace and Bigger flees with Bessie to an empty building, where he rapes her and then bludgeons her to death with a brick as he is frightened she will give him away. 
• Bigger is eventually captured and the public assume Bigger raped Mary before killing her. Jan enlists his friend Boris A. Max to defend Bigger free of charge and Bigger begins to see whites as individuals and himself as their equal. 
• Max tries to save Bigger from the death penalty, arguing that while Bigger is responsible for his crime, he is also a product of his environment. Nonetheless, Bigger is sentenced to death. 

Quotes

1. Was what he had heard about rich white people really true? Was he going to work for people like you saw in the movies . . . ? He looked at Trader Horn unfold and saw pictures of naked black men and women whirling in wild dances . . . 

2. The head hung limply on the newspapers, the curly black hair dragging about in blood. He whacked harder, but the head would not come off. . . . He saw a hatchet. Yes! That would do it. . . .

3. “Listen, Bigger,” said Britten. “Did you see this guy [Jan] act in any way out of the ordinary? I mean, sort of nervous, say? Just what did he talk about?
“He talked about Communists. . . .”
“Did he ask you to join?”
“He gave me that stuff to read.”
“Come on. Tell us some of the things he said.”
Bigger knew the things that white folks hated to hear Negroes ask for; and he knew that these were the things the Reds were always asking for.

4. He had done this. He had brought all this about. In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. 

5. There was something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and something he himself had. . . . [N]ever in all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness.