They are attracted to the world of wealthy whites in the newsreel and feel strangely moved by the tom-toms and the primitive black people in the film, yet also feel they are equal to those worlds.

Before the robbery, Bigger and Jack go to the movies. They are all afraid of attacking and stealing from a white man, but none of them wants to admit their concerns. Bigger tells him that every time he thinks about whites, he feels something terrible will happen to him.

He would like to leave his responsibilities forever, but when he thinks of what to do, he only sees a blank wall.īigger walks to a poolroom and meets his friend, Gus. Thomas scolds Bigger, who hates his family because they suffer and he cannot do anything about it. The room turns into a maelstrom, and after a violent chase, Bigger kills the animal with an iron skillet and terrorizes his sister Vera with the dead rat. Twenty-year-old Bigger Thomas lives in one room with his brother Buddy, his sister Vera, and their mother. However, it was also criticized by Baldwin and others as ultimately advancing Bigger as a stereotype, and not a real character. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation.' The book was a successful and groundbreaking best seller. 'In the end', writes Fanon, 'Bigger Thomas acts. 'No American Negro exists', James Baldwin once wrote, 'who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull.' Frantz Fanon discusses the feeling in his 1952 essay L'expérience vécue du noir ( The Fact of Blackness).

Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be. While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic causation behind them. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright.

Native son novel by richard wright