![]() ![]() He was, as he explains in my edition's afterword ( "How 'Bigger' was Born") trying to show how American society creates Biggers. ![]() He wasn't trying to make Bigger Thomas sympathetic as an individual. ![]() In other words, Bigger Thomas is the Big Scary Negro personified, a nightmare manifestation of white America's racial fears. He ends the book accused of the capital rape and murder of a white girl, whom he did murder (but did not in fact rape), but by his own words to his lawyer, makes clear that raping her was something he might have done, if the circumstances had been only slightly different. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.īigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, is a shiftless, bullying, vulgar young man who begins the book tormenting his poor mother, goes to a billiards club to plan a robbery with his equally ne'er-do-well friends, then he and one of his friends goes to a movie theater to masturbate in the seats. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. ![]() It could have been for assault or petty larceny by chance, it was for murder and rape. Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. ![]()
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