Friday, May 24, 2019

A Book Review of Native Son by Richard Wright

Strong interest in Wrights life, his work, and his influence continues in the 1980s and 1990s, although with not quite the same emphasis as in the preceding four decades. The focus of attention has shifted somewhat, with studies of Wrights political vision diminishing and analyses of his craftsmanship and literary sources increasing.The great majority of scholars and critics during this period are in general agreement about the centrality of Wrights position in African-American letters and his great importance in American and modern traditions, although some reappraisal of a negative sort has also developed, especially among those expressing dissatisfaction with Wrights portrayal of female characters.And with the publication in 1991 of the Library of America editions of Wrights major work, the critical response to Wright has entered an important bare-ass phase in which fundamental questions are now being raised about which texts are the most authentic representations of Wrights actu al intentions and which texts are highest in literary quality.Wrights achievement in autochthonal Son was not only to project the experience of American black people, in all its raw brutality tho also to form it into a rich, coherent, balanced vision of life. Wright attracted in some ways to Western culture because of its tradition of Enlightenment rationalism that promises political license to oppressed people. Wright was deeply suspicious of other aspects of the West, especially its history of racism.Although characters like Bigger doubting Thomas are initially described as alienated from both self and community, they experience genuine selfhood and become a participant in the life of the spirit by establishing kinship with others. I envision Bigger Thomas as caught between these two opposite qualities of Western culture, for he is both victimized by Western racism and also achieves selfhood in a very Western way through revolutionary will, individualism and self consciousness (p. 311).The slum conditions of the South Side so vividly portrayed in Native Son had been the daily reality of a decade in Wright life ( 1927- 1937). He had lived in a cramped and dirty flat with his aunt, mother, and brother. He had visited hundreds of sympathetic dwellings while working as an insurance agent.The details of the Chicago environment in the novel have a verisimilitude that is almost photographic. The Ernies Kitchen Shack of the novel, located at Forty-Seventh Street and Indiana Avenue, for example, is a slight disguise for an actual restaurant called The Chicken Shack, 4647 Indiana Avenue, of which one Ernie Henderson was owner. Similar documentary accuracy is find throughout the book.Wright drives his story forward at a furious yet skillfully controlled pace. The full drama is unfolded in just about two weeks. on that point is first of all the prophetic killing of a rat in the room where Bigger, his mother, his sister and his brother live in quarreling, desperat e squalor.Then Bigger, who has a giving name as a braggart living by shady devices, goes out to meet the poolroom gang environment provides. He plans a hold-up he is timid to carry out. To hide his cowardice he terrorizes one of his friends.You call for his character. That is the point. Wright is champion of a race, not defender of an individual wrongdoer. Bigger gets a job as chauffeur in the house of Mr. Dalton, who is a philanthropist toward Negroes and owner of many Negro tenements. Mary Dalton, the daughter of the house, and her friend Jan, a supernally noble radical, make him jollify with them. Through an accident, Bigger kills Mary Dalton.That is the first murder. There is a gruesome dismemberment to hide the crime. Bigger thinks of demanding money, and makes his girl, Bessie, help him. His crime is discovered. After that there is the flight, the fleck murder, deliberate and brutal, the manhunt spreading terror over the whole South Side, then the spectacular capture and the day of reckoning in court for all concerned.Apart from the ideas that elapse it volume, force and scope, Native Son has some magnificently realized scenes in the early part, where Bigger, a stranger and afraid, as Houseman said, in a earthly concern he never made, gropes for freedom from the walls that hold him in the flight across the roofs and the stand high over the world, in the jail where processions of people come to see him, at the inquest and in the howling mob outside the court.The measure in which it shakes a community is the measure of its effectiveness.

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