Native Son - Richard Wright [5]
Much of the composition of the novel came almost spontaneously, especially after Bigger had committed his crime, because the relationship of the white police to the black male was a story absolutely familiar to Wright and indeed to the black community as a whole. A windfall also came to Wright in May 1938 when a case similar in crucial respects to Bigger’s in Native Son broke in Chicago. That month, Robert Nixon, a young black man, along with an accomplice, was arrested and charged with the murder of a white woman beaten to death with a brick in her apartment in the course of a robbery. Securing virtually all the newspaper clippings about the Nixon case, Wright used many of its details in his novel. These details included copious examples of raw white racism, especially in depicting the black defendant as hardly more than an animal. (Confessing to an earlier murder of a woman with a brick, Robert Nixon was also implicated in the similar killing in Los Angeles of a woman and her young daughter. He was executed in August 1939.)
Although the Nixon trial material helped Wright, he was still left with the supreme problem of creating a fictional narrative with so brutalized and limited a character at its core. In a way, this was the same dilemma that faced all the major naturalist writers—for example, Stephen Crane in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets or Frank Norris in McTeague; but Wright’s difficulties were more severe, because it is hard to think of a central character in all of literature who is less likable than Bigger Thomas. With other blacks, Bigger is bullying, surly, treacherous, and cowardly; with whites—understandably, to be sure—he is wary and deceitful. How could Wright expect such a character to hold his novel together, and hold his readers’ interest?
Rather than dismiss Bigger’s inner life as unworthy of artistic attention (or social and political attention), Wright set out not simply to recreate its principal features but to allow these features to prescribe the form of his novel. He worked hard to evoke and dramatize the sordid, unstable reality of his main character’s inner life, which matched the sordidness and instability imposed on Bigger by white racism and the deep effects of that racism on black culture. In the tripartite division of Native Son—Fear, Flight, and Fate—is seen Wright’s instinctive grasp of the elemental starkness of Bigger’s life. From Wright’s sense of the pulsing instability of Bigger’s thoughts and emotions—now flaring with rage and desire, now chilly and brackish with despair and impotence—he fashioned the peculiar prose rhythms that dominate the book and make us feel, as readers, that we are sharing in Bigger’s moods and thoughts.
Native Son is a story that is at one level a seedy melodrama from the police blotter and, at the same time, an illuminating drama of an individual consciousness that challenges traditional definitions of character. Although at least one critic has written eloquently about the tragic dimensions of Bigger Thomas, to many other critics the most that probably can be said in this respect is that, at the end of his ordeal, Bigger possesses glimmerings of the ideals that might have allowed him to be seen as a tragic hero. There are many critics of the novel who find unconvincing even the modicum of change in Bigger at the end of the book. To Wright, it was also absolutely necessary that Bigger should learn from his ordeal; the problem was to find the appropriate degree of redemption or growth for a character who had been established at such a low point on the scale of humanity. Perhaps the change is unconvincing, as some assert; but it is hardly excessive. Wright resisted the promptings of propaganda