![]() ![]() Bigger is ashamed and angry when he first meets Mary, Jan, and the Dalton family-even Peggy, the Daltons’ head housemaid-because he senses that his blackness has led him into a position of servility to a white family. ![]() Bigger’s blackness, and the “whiteness” he encounters in large swaths of society, are not merely skin colors or racial barriers: they become, to Bigger and many others, symbolic distinctions between the morally fallen (blackness) and the morally pure (whiteness).įrom the beginning of the novel, when hanging out with “the gang” (including Jack and G.H.), Bigger announces that he cannot pursue his dream of becoming an aircraft pilot, because African Americans in Chicago are not permitted or encouraged to gain even a basic education. Native Son is a meditation on racial relations in 1930s Chicago, told from the perspective of Bigger Thomas, a young African-American man who, enraged at society, accidentally kills Mary Dalton, whose body he later burns in a furnace and Bessie, his “girl.” The novel’s author, Richard Wright, drawing in part on his own experiences as an African-American male growing up in the South and moving to Chicago, describes the sensation of “blackness” from Bigger’s perspective. ![]()
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