Native Son blogpost

There is no doubt that Native Son is filled with a feeling of inevitable doom, as if Bigger is cornered. From the very first scene of the novel. While the reader is not yet aware of it, the rat in Bigger’s home that he entraps and murders is a paradigm for his life in the rest of the book. At the very least, it certainly set the tone of inevitable tragedy. These occurrences that hint of tragedy continue throughout the novel. Later in the beginning of the book, Bigger sees a poster of Buckley has “You Can’t Win” printed on it. Bigger feels as if the eyes on this poster follow him as he moves, much like the reader feels a sense of doom follow them throughout the book. Every choice is the wrong choice is the wrong choice for Bigger; they all lead to a disastrous fate. He tries to pick the benevolent job over joining the local gang heist, but still ends up getting in the same amount (if not more) trouble.

There is no right choice because everything eventually leads to execution. There is something very ironic about this fact. Whenever Bigger tries to do the “right” thing, it ends up going poorly for him. For example, he puts the pillow over Mary’s face to keep her quiet and to keep them both from getting in trouble, but ends up murdering her which is much more problematic. Also earlier in the novel with the gang, he did the “right” thing by saying he didn’t want to kill anyone, even though he ended up doing just that anyway, twice. Not to mention that during both of the murders he carried out, he had a gun in his pocket that he almost never touched. Similarly, Bigger is working with relatively a very liberal white family, which one would think would be beneficial for him as a black man, but ultimately only muddles him. Mary and Jan try to befriend Bigger but in turn they are ignorantly being more racist.

Bigger is set up as a very logical character. To the reader, he seems to always do the only, right thing in his situation, however ironic it may be. So in the reader’s mind, there is no doubt that Bigger’s circumstances are due to something greater than Bigger himself. The impending doom that fills this novel symbolizes how the system of white supremacy is set up to doom even very logical people like Bigger. This shows that Bigger is entirely a product of his environment, because he is set up to be a fairly benevolent person but his circumstances cause him to commit terrible crimes. This idea that Bigger is forced to react this way because of his environment follows the naturalist worldview. This novel serves as an example of situations for people to see how white supremacy imposes upon black men.