FREE ESSAY ON THE NATIVE SON

THE NATIVE SON

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 them 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 them 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
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