The horror of Bigger Thomas: the perception of form without face in Richard Wright's 'Native Son.'

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by Stephen K. George

Richard Wright's depiction of Bigger Thomas, a young African American whose social environment moves him to murder and rape, is meant to be both sympathetic and shocking. We, as readers, are to feel compassion for Bigger as he is caught up in economic and racial forces he can neither comprehend nor control, but we are also to be horrified at his retaliatory answer: the gaining of freedom and identity through brutally unfeeling acts of violence. At once we are both compelled and repelled by Bigger; he is both a lonely individual robbed of dignity and hope in a world where" 'you [as a black man] ain't a man no more'" (326), as well as a monstrous symbol of what could happen nation-wide if society refuses to make the American dream of freedom and opportunity open to all. As Wright later wrote in "How 'Bigger' Was Born," his protagonist looms "as a symbolic figure of American life, a figure who would hold within him the prophecy of our future" and "the outlines of action and feeling which we would encounter on a vast scale in the days to come" (xx-xxi). As such, this 1940 novel served as a disturbing wake-up call to a nation on the verge of the Civil Rights Movement (Rampersad i).

However, rather than focusing on the racial and economic forces that shape and provoke Bigger (a review of which can be found in Jerry Bryant's "The Violence of Native Son"), this study will instead examine what these forces have made of him and his relationships with others when combined with Bigger's own natural disposition. Specifically, Bigger Thomas, throughout most of the novel, is an individual who can no longer see or make connections with other people; as Robert Butler notes concerning the whole work, "In its most basic terms, Native Son dramatizes a bleak environment in which people touch each other only in violence, almost never in love or friendship" (15). Hence, instead of real communication and interaction with others, Bigger's world is one of stereotypes and mere surfaces as he categorizes other people (who have previously categorized him) in order to gain some semblance of control over his own life. Or, as Louis Tremaine observes, "Bigger sees only what his fear allows him to see. Bigger's interactions with others are conditioned by his efforts to meet expectations by conforming to type. [And] . . . he can do this only by first typing those for whom he must play his various roles" (69).

Thus, for Bigger Thomas, a person whose "tangled duality has damaged him at the very center of his being" (Butler 14), the people of his life, both black and white, are no longer people but things: his mother someone to deceive and put off concerning his employment, his girlfriend Bessie someone to "use" (Native Son 131) for sex and as a partner in crime, and white people another entity altogether:

To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people [at all]; they were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming overhead, or like a deep swirling river stretching suddenly at one's feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond certain limits, there was no need to fear that white force. But whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives they lived with it . . . [and] acknowledged its reality . . . [and] paid mute tribute to it. (109)

In this sense, Bigger Thomas and "his kind" are as racist as anyone else, for their fear and anger blind them to the humanity and individuality of those around them, and especially of the white people, the tiny drops in that "deep swirling river." This is not to say that Bigger is to blame for this "fear of both himself and of others [that] is an obstacle to" real interaction and intimacy (Tremaine 66); as Native Son shows with shocking force, a society that denies one's individuality - that, in Bigger's words, won't" 'even let you feel what you want to feel'" (327) - through economic and racial restraints must bear at least some of the responsibility for the "wheel of blood" that follows (362). But this lack or lessening of blame in no way alleviates the awful effects on Bigger (and on others, especially Mary and Bessie) of his racism. As Tremaine writes, "All of this typing, both of self and of others, takes its toll" by "continually" frustrating Bigger's longings "for genuine acceptance and understanding" (69), a frustration which finally explodes in violence as his only means for expression and control.

While the source of this frustration in Bigger Thomas has been discussed previously by critics (who have understood it as a "dissociated sensibility" that prevents the expression of "emotional experience" [Tremaine 64], on the one hand, and a "tangled duality" of Bigger's "romantic" and "naturalistic" selves [Butler 14], on the other), what Bigger and his human interactions have actually become can be better understood by applying the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish Lithuanian born in 1906 who was himself a prisoner during World War II (Hand 1-2). In his monumental ethical work, Totality and Infinity, Levinas describes the purest and most basic human relationship as the face-to-face encounter of the same and the other, in which the face or expression of the other breaks through its own limited form and speaks to me (the same) in a way that ultimately transcends any of my attempts to define, categorize, or totalize it for my own egocentric purposes. In this pure and even sacred encounter, the other refuses any reduction to a totality comprised of my own expectations and definitions, my feeble attempts to grasp his or her "otherness." Rather, the other standing before me remains "transcendent" to myself and "absolutely other," a being with an identity beyond the demands of any philosophical or organizing system of the same (39, 198).