SOURCE: Saunders, James Robert. “The Social Significance of Wright's Bigger Thomas.” College Literature 14, no. 1 (winter 1987): 32-7.

In an article entitled “Richard Wright's Blues,” which is included in his volume of essays, Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison describes what he regards as a “basic ambiguity” in Richard Wright's sensational Native Son. Ellison, a contemporary of Wright's who survived to evaluate new generations of black American writers, assessed it as a crucial flaw that “Wright had to force into Bigger's consciousness concepts and ideas which his intellect could not formulate.”¹ That complaint stems from Ellison's belief that Wright compromised too much of his own personality to achieve the fundamental theme of Bigger Thomas' frustrated existence.

To determine the validity of Ellison's complaint one must ask who is Bigger Thomas and why did the author find it necessary to create such a terrifying character? The novel might just as easily have been an American romance or at least a tale of people managing to find some solace in the midst of a world that has become increasingly complex. Wright, however, chose to give us an unpleasant view of American life, and thus the controversial anti-hero Bigger Thomas was created. The author in his introduction, “How Bigger Was Born,” explains, “What made Bigger's social consciousness most complex was the fact that he was hovering unwanted between two worlds—between powerful America and his own stunted place in life—and I took upon myself the task of trying to make the reader feel this No Man's Land.”² Perhaps the key word in this explication is “stunted,” for one must wonder about the absurdity of Thomas' position in a society that we sing about as being “the land of the free” and praise as being an endless source of opportunity. How did Bigger Thomas evolve in this much heralded land?

Of course we could look back into America's past and put the blame for the evolution of Bigger Thomas squarely on the institution of slavery. We would to some degree be correct in offering that as the reason for various ills that continue to accrue to the black race even to this day. Michel Fabre, in his definitive biography of the author, notes that Wright thought of the average black person as exceptional merely for having survived the racist circumstances of American life. More specifically, one need only delve into the background of the artist himself. Having been born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908, Wright remembers, in the autobiographical Black Boy, that when he was a child, “Hunger had always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly.”³ Decades after slavery had officially ended, blacks continued to suffer from the deprivation associated with a race struggling to advance beyond the lowest socio-economic level that any group in this country has ever experienced. As the son of a sharecropper, one step removed from slavery, young Wright directly felt the pain.

Yet even before Native Son and Black Boy, Wright had written Lawd Today, a more clearly existential view of conditions in these United States, based on the life of one black post office worker in Chicago during the 1930s. However, we would be remiss to assume that Wright here limited his analysis to black men victimized by an unsympathetic white world. The author instead meant to expose the nature of life in general. Lewis Leary perceptively remarks:

Jake Jackson's long, harrassed, expectant, shattered activities during a single winter day in Chicago, though less celebrated than Bigger's awful experience, and less melo-dramatic and less productive of polemic also, nonetheless provide a powerful and terrifying insight into what it must be to be black in America, the essential bleakness of black life, the cultural barrenness. But it also, insidiously, provides glimpses into what it means to be white, colorless, ubiquitous.⁴

The protagonist of this novel (which Leary refers to as Wright's “first/last” novel, because it was the first novel written by the artist but the last to be published) does represent more than the so-called black plight in America. As a release from the boredom of his postal occupation, Jackson joins with three other men who play whist for a diversion, and on at least one occasion the players erupt into uncontrollable laughter and then they “paused for breath, and then they laughed at how they had laughed; and because they had laughed at how they had laughed, they laughed and laughed and laughed.”⁵ This fit of hysterical laughter on the part of all four card players serves to reveal the very absurdity of Jackson's everyday life.

If one looks far enough beneath the surface of color it becomes obvious that Jackson is not unlike the blue-collared Stanley Kowalski of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. As his world seems ready to crumble down about him, that descendent of Polish immigrants engages in his regular poker night as though it were some therapeutic measure for impending chaos. In reality, the absurdity of his existence parallels that of the mythical Sisyphus, who pushes his heavy burden up the mountain again and again although he knows that it will only keep on rolling back down for him to push it up again. The message is that mankind is really at a loss to explain the reason for existence.

Nathan Scott is wrong in concluding that “at its center Native Son exhibits nothing other than a socially discarnate and demoniac wrath.”⁶ This reaction is reminiscent of Southern politicians' reactions in the 1940s to the fact that a black man had dared to be so blunt about life in America. It reminds one of the push, by many white college professors, to have Ellison's Invisible Man regarded as the greatest novel ever written by an American black. They proclaim that they enjoy Ellison's work more because it, as opposed to Native Son, has universal value.

I would argue, on the other hand, that Invisible Man is as indicative of “demoniac wrath” as is the groundbreaking Native Son. Who, for example, is more despicable in American literature than the treacherous Dr. Bledsoe who ruthlessly contrives a means for the invisible man's demise? The difference between those two novels is that the college president, Bledsoe, does not bludgeon his victims to death. Instead, he plots behind the scenes to insure the socio-economic and spiritual destruction of those he does not like.

As a depiction of human flaws, Ellison's work is universal—but Native Son is just as crucial to an understanding of human nature in the midst of dire circumstances. Upon committing two hideous murders, Thomas marvels:

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. He was living, truly and deeply, no matter what others might think. … Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions.

(224-25)

Frustrated by his limited position in society, the black chauffeur seems destined to kill the wealthy white Mary Dalton and equally destined to murder the unsuspecting Bessie Mears, whose meaning in life is similarly limited to all the liquor and sex that Thomas can provide.

It is fairly safe to say that Dalton's death is an accident; however, as students in one of my black literature classes agreed, that death seems too much to be pre-ordained, as if there is no other way the restricted relationship between Thomas and Dalton could have ended. Once he chooses to deliver the intoxicated Dalton daughter to her bedroom, his fate is sealed. And then it is only in the ordinary course of events that he will take that other life, Bessie's, which had appeared to be as lacking in meaning as his own. It is a powerful statement about the society in which we live that anyone would have to murder to achieve some semblance of identity. Nevertheless, we know that being a murderer has in some sense satisfied what had been Thomas' desperate yearning to be somebody, and we can only guess at just how many criminals have felt the same.

In talking about Thomas in a college class composed almost equally of whites and blacks, I found it interesting that nearly everyone sympathized with what he was going through. Students between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five (including an elderly Jewish woman who had to sell her downtown business establishment because of rising crime) declared that they understood what drove him to the depths of depression where the novel ends. They feared him, and yet they understood him. As strange as it might sound to some, Bigger Thomas and his plight do have universal appeal.

Wright himself echoed the disillusionment of many when he fled with his wife from the United States in 1946 to live in Paris. Generally speaking, he left to avoid any further suffering of racial oppression; much like Bigger Thomas, he was denied the opportunity to pursue individual identity, irrespective of race. It is in The Outsider that we receive a great deal of the existential philosophy behind the frustration that prompted Wright to leave. Like Jake Jackson, Cross Damon is confined to working at a job that he despises. However, the difficulty for Damon began even earlier than that for “he was convinced that there were no happy childhoods, that the myth of the happy childhood had been invented by middle-class people to show that their parents had money when they were children, or by people whose memories of unpleasant days were so defective that they could delude themselves into believing that they had come into this world trailing clouds of glory.”⁷ One cannot help but be reminded of Black Boy where the youngster Wright experienced about as little happiness as one might deem possible for a child to survive.

It is not unreasonable to suspect that in a way the fictional Native Son takes up where the autobiographical Black Boy leaves off. We find the sharecropper's son fleeing his oppressive South to find a better life in the North. Yet Chicago proves to be no “promised land.” And the story of Bigger Thomas is the tale of many an American who has ventured into unchartered territory, seeking the good life promised by our national creeds and slogans.

Some do succeed in their quests, but Native Son tells of how it is for countless others who fail. For those who are offended by the violence in that novel, it is essential to consider the words of John Reilly who, in his afterword to Native Son, declares—

violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed. When life in society consists of humiliation, one's only rescue is through rebellion. It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

(395)

The humiliation Reilly mentions is conveyed most effectively by Wright as he portrays the shattered life of Bigger Thomas. Yet the novel is indicative of more than just one man's predicament; it tells about the plight of blacks in general and of others who compose the lower classes. As the author gives Thomas a certain capacity for insight, we are made to question the motivation for violent action and made to perceive how alienation can result in catastrophic social harm.

Notes

1. Ralph Ellison. “Richard Wright's Blues.” In Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964: 89.

2. Richard Wright. Native Son. 1940. Rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1966: xxiv. Additional page reference is in this edition.

3. Richard Wright. Black Boy. 1945. Rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1966: 21.

4. Lewis Leary. “Lawd Today: Notes on Richard Wright's First/Last Novel.” CLA Journal 15 (1972): 412.

5. Richard Wright. Lawd Today. 1963. Rpt. New York: Avon, 1969: 92.

6. Nathan Scott. “The Dark and Haunted Tower of Richard Wright.” In The Black Novelist. Ed. Robert Hemenway. Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1970: 76.

7. Richard Wright. The Outsider. 1953. Rpt. New York: Harper & Row, 1965: 414.