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The following paper topics are designed to encourage your understanding of the novel as a whole, and to help you analyze important themes and literary techniques. A sample outline is included with each topic, indicating one (but not the only) possible approach to it.

Topic #1

Alienation is a very important theme in Richard Wright’s novel. It is a concept that is also important in both Marxism and existentialism, two philosophies which Wright adopted and advocated during different periods in his life. One definition of alienation is that it is the condition in which all human beings are the creators of the wealth and culture of a society, but few are allowed to participate in the fruit of their creation. The majority are denied that enjoyment. Instead of controlling society, they are controlled by it. Instead of being or feeling included, they are excluded, or alienated. Discuss how Bigger’s life is a life alienated from American society.

Outline

I. Thesis Statement: The title of the novel, Native Son, refers to Bigger Thomas, and suggests that he is a native of the United States, that he belongs here. Yet Bigger’s experience is one in which he is everywhere denied his birthright and alienated from the society into which he has been born.

II. The conditions of Bigger’s life
A. Early life of poverty in segregated South.
B. Family fled north after father was killed.
C. In the North, he lives on welfare in one rat-infested tenement room with mother, brother, and sister.
D. Faces choice of a life of petty crime, or one of menial labor as a servant.

III. Institutionalized racism in the 1930s America
A. Segregated housing in North and South.
B. African Americans excluded from serving on juries, and from specialized training, such as would be required for Bigger to have become an aviator.
C. In the armed forces, African Americans confined to menial jobs.

IV. Bigger’s consciousness of his alienated condition
A. Sees an airplane and tells his friend “I could fly one of them things if I had a chance.”
B. Views newsreel of Mary Dalton in Florida, having a “vacation,” something he cannot have.
C. “Sees” his rat-infested tenement room as if for the first time, after seeing how the Daltons live.
D. States, in his first conversation with Max, that whites “own everything. They choke you off the face of the earth. They like God.…They don’t even let you feel what you want to feel. They after you so hot and hard you can only feel what they doing to you. They kill you before you die.”

Topic #2

Throughout the novel, Richard Wright uses blindness as a metaphor for unconsciousness and ignorance, and sight as a metaphor for consciousness and understanding. With examples from the text, illustrate Wright’s literary technique, and discuss Bigger’s development within the context of blindness and sight.

Outline

I. Thesis Statement: Literal and metaphorical references to “blindness” and “sight” abound in Native Son, and they give good indication of the relative consciousness or unconsciousness of many of the characters—especially Bigger—at any given point in time.

II. Examples of blindness and sight
A. Mrs. Dalton, who is literally and metaphorically blind, is herself a metaphor for the blind white power structure.
B. Bessie Mears’ transformation from self-admitted blindness to sight.
C. Jan Erlone’s transformation, which he conveys to Bigger in their meeting in Bigger’s cell.
D. Universal overview (absolute sight) in Boris Max’s speech.

III. Bigger’s blindness and sight
A. Bigger’s remarks to his friends about blacks and whites, and his frustation with his own lack of opportunity, indicate that he has sight early on.
B. The sense of power Bigger derives from killing momentarily heightens his sight: he “sees” Bessie’s blindness, and the blindness of his poor sister. He also “sees” his home as if for the first time.
C. Bigger’s blindness returns as his power diminishes, as he is pursued and caught.
D. Return of Bigger’s sight is indicated by his renewed interest in his own case, by his will to live, and especially by his brief relationship with Boris Max. He reveals his own true consciousness to another person for the first time, and he describes with great clarity what his life has been like.
E. Limit on Bigger’s development, and on Max’s absolute sight, is Bigger’s impending execution. Max is unable to communicate well, and Bigger arrives at an unsettling attitude toward his crimes. Bigger’s attitude is understandable, given the life he has led, but it is a form of blindness, nonetheless.

Topic #3

Philosophers have long argued about how much freedom people have to decide their own actions, and to what degree their choices are made of necessity—influenced by forces beyond their control. Morality, the system whereby a person’s action is judged to be good or bad, is dependent upon this issue of freedom of choice. If every person is equally and absolutely free to do whatever they want, then morality too may be equal and absolute, and everyone’s actions can be judged according to the same standards. If, however, some people are more and others less free, then a more complex moral code may be needed. How much freedom does Bigger have to decide his own actions? Should his crimes be judged according to an absolute moral code?

Outline

I. Thesis Statement: At Bigger’s trial, the author provides the reader with two conflicting moral codes. One is simple and absolute. It is voiced by David Buckley, Bigger’s prosecutor, and holds that Bigger has committed monstrous crimes against society, that he is irredeemably evil and must be put to death. Bigger’s lawyer, Boris Max, offers an opposing and more complex judgment of Bigger’s actions, and one that is much more in keeping with the truth behind his crimes.

II. Contradictions within Buckley’s absolute morality
A. Fraught with racist terminology.
B. Based partly on a crime—the rape of Mary Dalton—that Bigger did not commit.
C. Assigns less importance to crimes against Bessie Mears than to those against Mary Dalton.
D. Makes his uncompromising judgment against Bigger partly for cynical reasons—to aid his own reelection campaign.
E. Treats other murderers, such as gangsters, with more leniency than Bigger.

III. Elements of Boris Max’s view of morality
A. Attempts to explain Bigger’s actions and to seek their cause, rather than merely condemning them.
B. States that Bigger’s life has been defined by poverty, segregation, and servitude, conditions that have fostered fear and anger inside him.
C. States that these conditions have been imposed upon Bigger and millions of other African Americans by a white power structure. Therefore African Americans—Bigger included—have not freely chosen the kind of lives they lead.
D. States that Bigger killed Mary Dalton inadvertently, while attempting to keep from being discovered in a position that the white authorities have declared warrants the death penalty.
E. States that Bigger’s actions, including his terrible crimes, have therefore been largely determined by conditions imposed upon him by outside forces he does not control. The element of free choice in his actions has been negligible.
F. Finally, states that Bigger must not, therefore, be executed as an evil criminal, because his crimes were an outgrowth of the only life he ever knew—a life of brutality and deprivation. Instead, he should go to prison, which would, ironically, be the best home he has ever known. Furthermore, as incredible as it may sound, as a prisoner he would have his first recognized relationship with official society.

Topic #4

The author’s main purpose in Native Son was to portray in the starkest and most undeniably clear light, the separate and degraded existence of millions of African Americans, and to demonstrate how this existence is forced upon them, in specific ways by a specific power structure. It has been many decades since Native Son first appeared. To what extent have the conditions of African American life changed since the late 1930s, when Bigger Thomas and his family lived in the Depression-era Chicago ghetto?

Outline

I.Thesis Statement: While there have been many changes in African American life in the decades since the 1930s, the fundamental problems of poverty and racial segregation Richard Wright described in Native Son are still with us.

II. Changes in African American life since the 1930s
A. Military desegregated after the Second World War.
B. Civil Rights movement won many rights and dismantled legal segregation in the South, through mass struggle in the 1950s and early 1960s.
1. Legal segregation of Southern schools ended.
2. Legal segregation in the South of public transportation, restaurants, bathrooms, ended.
3. Voting rights won in the South.
C. Struggles in the North won many legal rights, such as anti-discrimination laws in housing and employment.

III. What has remained unchanged since the 1930s.
A. Poverty, relative to white population.
B. De facto (actual) as opposed to de jure (legal) segregation in housing and schools: Bigger Thomas would easily recognize Chicago today, where the South Side ghetto is just as vast, as poor, and as black as it was in the 1930s.
C. Partial or total legal reversals of many of the gains made by working people over the years (such as affirmative action in hiring, the right to strike, and unemployment and welfare benefits) are today being contemplated by powerful politicians.
D. Principal reason Wright wrote Native Son was to expose racism and poverty in the North, where there was little, if any, legal segregation in the 1930s. The Northern political and economic power structure that Wright was criticizing remains in control of the country.

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