A person’s surroundings influence their life; family, friends, society, alcohol, and emotions affect the way a person acts and thinks in their surroundings. Constant control or oppression can cause someone to become filled with tremendous hate towards the entity that restrains them. This entity can create a brute that will commit unnatural crimes. Friends can influence one’s actions in their everyday life. This influence can cause a person to consider breaking an ultimate taboo of their society. Family influences a person’s emotions, actions, motives, and goals.
The consumption of alcohol can make men become brutes and cause them to commit gruesome crimes. A person’s emotions can greatly influence their actions and control their life. In Native Son, the current society that surrounded Bigger Thomas shaped him into a brute and filled him with fear and hate; proving the fact that a man like Bigger could exist in modern society. In Native Son, the character of Bigger formed from the negative environment and the overwhelming oppression that surrounded his life.
By the age of twenty, Bigger Thomas’s life, filled with hate, racism, and fear, became a tragedy. Bigger did not think about the future; he only thought about the present, because “that was the way he lived; he passed his days trying to defeat and gratify powerful impulses in a world he feared” (Wright, 42). Because his life consisted of such great hardships, he had to spend the majority of his time trying to control these urges; however, Bigger did lose his temper and his patience in some situations such as the murder of Mary Dalton.
He lived in a world that he feared and hated. Whenever he thought about white society, he felt “like somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down [his] throat” (Wright, 20). The burning sensation was the irrepressible essence of the white society that surrounded the Black Belt in Chicago. The vast separation of the two environments, the black community and the white community, that existed in his life caused Bigger to “feel like [he is] on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in a fence” (Wright, 20). Bigger felt that he was not part of the normal world.
He was forced to live in poverty, because the realestate companies would not allow blacks to live in other parts of the city. He could not live comfortably in a cramped, one-room apartment with the rest of his family. If Bigger received a good job, his mother believed she could “fix up a nice place [and they] could be comfortable and not have to like pigs” (Wright, 11). Bigger and his mother constantly argued over subject of his employment. She also questioned Bigger’s masculinity and proclaimed the family did not have “to live in this garbage dump if [he] had any manhood in [him]” (Wright, 8).
This caused Bigger’s temper and his hate towards his family to build up. Bigger hated his family because “he knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair” (Wright, 10). This hatred created a man who denied himself and attempted to act tough in front of others. After he met Jan while he was with Mary, Bigger “felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to his black skin” (Wright, 67).
The way Jan and Mary treated Bigger made him truly feel that his black skin brought shame upon him in the presence of individuals that lived in the rich, white society. These harsh surroundings and experiences created the character of Bigger whose life consisted of a constant feeling of hate, anger, and detachment. In the novel, Bigger acts and thinks the way he does because of the powerful emotions that control his life. He only thinks of himself when he acts and thinks; he completely disregards the feelings and the lives of others. At the beginning of the novel,
Bigger’s mother stated one of the main influences in his life, pleasure. He would not accept a job until the relief office would threaten to cut off his food. Bigger could either “take the job at Dalton’s and be miserable, or he could refuse it and starve” (Wright, 12). This maddened him because he could not believe that he did not have better options to choose from. By thinking only of himself, Bigger caused his family to suffer. Due to a growing need for pleasure, he often “longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies” (Wright, 28).
The relationship Bigger has with his friends greatly influences his actions and decisions. This relationship with Gus, G. H. , and Jack filled Bigger with a great amount of fear. While waiting on Gus to return for the robbery, Bigger’s emotions “had made him feel instinctively that it would be better to fight Gus and spoil the plan of the robbery than to confront a white man with a gun, but he kept this knowledge of fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness” (Wright, 42).
He has to resort to violence to hide his emotions from his friends. Fear caused him to humiliate his friend instead of robbing a white man’s store. This fear of his friends was so great that Bigger would not stop fearing them until after he killed Mary. After murdering Mary Dalton, he gave a carton of cigarettes to each of his friends, and this “was the first time he had ever been in their presence without being fearful” (Wright, 113). Bigger suffocated Mary Dalton because he feared being discovered lying with a young, drunk white girl.
He knew that a black man did not have a chance of explaining the situation to the white society; this led him to kill and burn Mary Dalton in an attempt to escape this fear. The killing of Mary did not make Bigger “feel sorry for [her]; she was not real to him, not a human being; he had not known her long or well enough for that” (Wright, 114). Bigger could commit such horrible murders because he was able to separate himself from his victims. “He had killed many times before”, and this crime seemed natural; he felt that all of his life had been leading to something like this” (Wright, 106). Bigger was not concerned with the actual acts of murder; “it was knowing and feeling that he could never make anybody know what had driven him to it” (Wright, 308). He hated the fact that people would never understand why he had to kill Bessie or Mary. The emotions of fear, pleasure, and anger influenced Bigger’s actions and thoughts throughout the novel. In the novel, Bigger’s family and friends, white society, and alcohol are the main influences in his life.
Bigger’s friends were Jack, G. H. , and Gus. The gang would play pool and rob stores during their free time. Bigger’s mother warned him that if he did not “stop running with that gang of [his] and do right [he’ll] end up where [he] never thought [he] would… and the gallows is at the end of the road [he] traveling” (Wright, 9). His friends influenced his daily actions and increased his temper problems. However, this friendship did not have as much influence as the overwhelming control as the power white society had over them.
The reluctance the friends had about robbing Blum’s exemplifies the amount of influence the white world had on Bigger. Bigger, Jack, G. H. , and Gus “had the feeling that the robbing of Blum’s would be a violation of ultimate taboo; it would be trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an alien white world would be turned loose upon them; in short, it would be a symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them; a challenge they yearned to make” (Wright, 14).
The fear of how the white society would react to the robbery caused doubt in the minds of the friends. The white world seemed to exist on another planet in the eyes of Bigger and his friends; however, white society still had a vast control over them. Bigger longed to be able to do the things white men and women were able to do. The skywriter exemplifies this goal that Bigger has. He questioned why he would never have the chance to fly the airplane. Gus asked him to estimate the height of the plane, and Bigger said, “Maybe a hundred miles; maybe a housand” (Wright, 16). Bigger’s estimation shows how far away he feels from the white world. This world stopped Bigger from accomplishing the goals and the dreams he wished to obtain. While in the car with Mary, he felt some freedom at first, but “was tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do”(Wright,65). Even though they sat in the same car, Bigger and Mary were still miles apart from each other.
Mary’s world controlled Bigger; it determined his actions and set limits on his aspirations. When Bigger shattered this barrier by killing Mary, the white world “regarded him as a figment of that black world where they feared and were anxious to keep under control” (Wright, 276). They felt their influence over the black community became weakened and wanted to make an example of Bigger by killing him. At the trial, Max explained to the state attorney that “[he is] defending this boy because she is] convinced that men like you made him what he is” (Wright, 292).
This exemplifies how the powerful, white society created and controlled the character of Bigger Thomas. After he murdered Mary, Bigger “felt he was cut off from [his family] forever, he had a strange hankering for their presence; he wanted to know how he would feel if he saw them again” (Wright, 111). The absence of this dominating force, his family, in his life made Bigger feel “like a man reborn, he wanted to test and taste each thing now to see how it went; like a man risen up well from a long illness, he felt deep and wayward whims” (Wright, 111).
By losing the presence of one of his main influences, Bigger thought of himself as a new man. Bigger committed a gruesome act of murder after becoming intoxicated with Jan and Mary. The power of alcohol overwhelmed Bigger while he sexually assaulted and killed Mary in her bedroom and while he raped and killed Bessie in an abandoned building. Alcohol can stimulate and paralyze a man’s senses and emotions at the same time. This can cause a man, such as Bigger Thomas, to become a brute. Liquor can actually ake a brute out of any man, black or white, but Bigger committed one of the most unnatural crimes under the influence of alcohol.
The white society saw Bigger as a degenerate that attempted to reverse humankind’s evolutionary principle. This led the entire white nation to automatically condemn Bigger Thomas to death in their minds. This shows the immense fear society had of degenerates that existed in their world, which led them to attempt to remove this influence. The novel Native Son introduced the character of Bigger Thomas and depicted a series of events towards the end of his life.
During the novel, Bigger sexually assaulted and murdered two women, Mary and Bessie, and was condemned to death. The harsh environment and influences that envelop Bigger’s life led him to commit these horrible crimes. Due to society’s influence, criminals similar to Bigger exist today. Similar to today’s society, a person’s family environment, friends, and economic status directly correlate to one’s involvement in criminal activity. Richard Wright’s development the character of Bigger Thomas proves the possible existence of Bigger in today’s society.
