Native Son Essay: The Quest for Identity -- Native Son Essays

Native Son The Quest for Identity The violence depicted in Native Son, although quite grotesque, is absolutely necessary to deliver the full importee that Richard Wright wishes to convey. largers many acts of violence are, in effect, a quest for a soul. He desires an identity that is his alone. Both the white and the black communities have robbed him of dignity, identity, and individuality. The human align of the urban center is closed to him, and for the most part Bigger relates more to the faceless mass of the buildings and the mute body of the city than to another human being. He constantly sums up his feelings of frustration as wanting to blot go forth those around him, as they have effectively blocked him out of their lives by assuming that he will fail in any cause before he tries. He has feelings, too, of fear, as Wright remarks He was following a strange path in a strange land (p.127). His mothers doctrine of suffering to wait for a later reward is equally stagnating - - to Bigger it appears that she is weak and will not fight to live. Her religion is a blindness but she needs to be blind in order to survive, to conk out into a society that would drive a seeing person mad. all(a) of the characters that Bigger says are blind are living in dimness because the light is too painful. Bigger wants to break through that blindness, to discover something of value in himself, thinking that all one had to do was be bold, do something nobody ever thought of. The whole things came to him in the form of a powerful and simple feeling there was in everyone a not bad(p) hunger to believe that made them blind, and if he could see while others were blind, whence he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it (p.120). Just as ... ...ne who will remember. His thought Max did not withal know (p.494) shows some of the passion behind his quest for self. If extreme senses are polar opposites of each other, and one is born simply with the capacity for emot ion itself, then Bigger could have been great. But the image of the death of the product, the child, of the city appeals to those who caused his birth, and there is no redemption for Bigger. Society hates most what it itself creates, and Bigger as the very reflection of that society must die. He is not a good person, he is not noble or true or brilliantly creative. But he has the capacity for all of those things, and has not been habituated the chance to fulfill them. His offence of violence is as much the crime of the people around him, who stifled his soul and nourished the other, baser side of him that was the further way he had of self-expression.