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

The significance of this last attempt to connect - " 'Tell Jan hello' " - should not be discounted, despite the dark intonations of Bigger's previous affirmation that what he" 'killed for must've been good!'" (392), for while Bigger in all likelihood remains an emotionally disturbed person, he has learned something, and that something seems to be that people are more than types or things to use or attack or shield oneself from. Richard Wright's use of violence in Native Son, far from being gratuitous evidence of Bigger's dissolution, in effect allows us to measure this moral progress, for by the novel's end Bigger Thomas has changed from a brutal rapist and murderer to someone who ultimately sees others as human beings like himself. Perhaps this transcendent insight is the "faint, wry" part of Bigger's final "bitter smile" (392), a smile that can now find a face within the human form that confronts him.

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955.

Butler, Robert James. "The Function of Violence in Richard Wright's Native Son." Black American Literature Forum 20 (1986): 9-25.

Hand, Sean. "Introduction." The Levinas Reader. By Emmanuel Levinas. Ed. Hand. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 1-8.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1982.

-----. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.

Mootry, Maria K. "Bitches, Whores, and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies in the Art of Richard Wright." Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1984. 117-27.

Rampersad, Arnold. "Introduction." Native Son. By Richard Wright. New York: Harper, 1993. xi-xxviii.

Tremaine, Louis. "The Dissociated Sensibility of Bigger Thomas in Wright's Native Son." Studies in American Fiction 14 (1986): 63-76.

Wright, Richard. "How 'Bigger' Was Born." Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940. vii-xxxiv.

-----. Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940.

Stephen K. George is Assistant Professor of English at Frederick Community College in Frederick, Maryland. His current research centers on the application of ethical theory to modern American literature.