Native Son Essay: The Tragedy -- Native Son Essays

Native Son: The Tragedy  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚        Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Richard Wright's Native Son a very moving novel. Perhaps this is largely due to Wright's skillful merging of his narrative voice with Bigger's which allows the reader to feel he is also inside Bigger's skin. There is no question that Bigger is a tragic figure, even an archetypical one, as he represents the African American experience of oppression in America. Wright states in the introduction, however, that there are Biggers among every oppressed people throughout the world, arguing that many of the rapidly changing and uncertain conditions of the modern world, a modern world largely founded on imperialism and exploitation, have created people like Bigger, restless and adrift, searching for a place for themselves in a world that, for them, has lost many of its cultural and spiritual centers. Because Wright chose to deal with the experience he knew best, Native Son is an exploration of how the pressure and racism of the American cultural environment affects black peop le, their feelings, thoughts, self-images, in fact, their entire lives, for one learns from Native Son that oppression permeates every aspect of life for both the oppressed and oppressor, though for one it is more overt than the other. Though this paper deals with Bigger's character and how the last scene of the novel reflects an evolution and realization in his character in terms of Arthur Miller's definition of tragedy, the issue of mass oppression of one people by another embodies the dimensions of a larger tragedy that is painfully embedded within human history.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Many of Native Son's earlier scenes serve Wright's purposes in showing how America's white rascism affects Bigger's behavior, his thinking and... ...rd Wright's Art of Tragedy. Iowa City: U of Iowa Press, 1986. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study Literature and Society. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth, ed. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge UP, 1990. Macksey, Richard and Frank E. Moorer, eds. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969. Miller, Eugene E. Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Rampersad, Arnold, ed. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995.