Native Son (Paperback) ~ Wright (Author) and Arnold Ram... Cover Art

Native Son (Paperback)

By: Wright (Author) and Arnold Rampersad (Introduction by)


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Also Available in: [Hardcover] | [Audio]
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Review

"Mr. Wright does spoil his story at the end by insisting on Bigger's fate as representative of the whole Negro race and making Bigger himself say so. But this is a minor fault in a good cause. The story is a strong and powerful one and it alone will force the Negro issue into our attention. Certainly 'Native Son' declares Richard Wright's importance, not merely as the best Negro writer, but as an American author as distinctive as any of those now writing."

"Mr. Wright has chosen for his 'hero,' not a sophisticated Negro who at least understands his predicament and can adapt himself to it, but a 'bad nigger,' a 'black ape,' who is only dimly aware of his extra-human status and therefore completely at the mercy of the impulses it generates....One gets a picture of a dark world enclosed by a living white wall....Bigger and his friends are resentful; all feel powerless and afraid of the white world, which exploits, condescends to, and in turn fears the race it has segregated....Mr. Wright has laid bare, with a ruthlessness that spares neither race, the lower depths of the human and social relationship of blacks and whites; and his ruthlessness...clearly springs not from a vindictive desire to shock but from a passionate--and compassionate--concern with a problem obviously lying at the core of his own personal reality....It is not pleasant to feel at the end that one is an accessory to the crimes of Bigger Thomas; but that feeling is impressive evidence of the power of Mr. Wright's indictment with its cutting and accurate title of 'Native Son.'"

"The most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means to be a Negro in America."

Annotation

Bigger Thomas, a young black man in Chicago, murders two women and is condemned to death. Bigger, whose crimes escalate as the story takes its sad and terrible course, feels--like Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov in CRIME AND PUNISHMENT--that the act of murder is a kind of existential act, and is the only kind of freedom he has ever known. Wright deliberately avoided making his protagonist a sympathetic character, wishing to accurately depict the dehumanization of blacks in American society, as well as his belief that Bigger, as a product of his environment, is not truly guilty of the murders he committed.



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