Native Son: Key Facts | SparkNotes (2024)

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What is the main point of Native Son? ›

Richard Wright's Native Son is a horrific story about a young black man who accidentally kills a young white woman and then pays the ultimate price. The story of Bigger Thomas, a black man who goes to work for a wealthy white family in Chicago, touches on themes such as race and family.

It's a tough book because Bigger Thomas is hard to forgive and impossible to like. In Book One, he takes a job working as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family and accidentally kills the daughter. He panics and attempts to cover up the murder, before figuring out a way he could potentially profit from it.

It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. Thomas accidentally kills a white woman at a time when racism is at its peak and he pays the price for it.

Native Son centers around a poor African American man demonized by the public and sentenced to death after accidentally killing a white woman. Native Son is a social commentary criticizing how American society was built off oppression and condemns Black men and women to live violent, stunted lives.

The series of images in Native Son have obvious symbols The white snow, the white cat and the white men all together form a vast, forceful, and cruel white society which racial segregation and racial oppression are practiced.

The color red is a motif in Richard Wright's Native Son because it appears throughout the story in reference to Communism, the fire that burns the victim's body, and the anger in Bigger's (the protagonist's) eyes.

Native Son is partly based on the story of Robert Nixon, an eighteen-year-old African American arrested for murder-ing a white woman in Chicago in 1938. In spite of contradictory evidence, Nixon was found guilty by an all-white jury in 1939 and sent to the electric chair (Kinnamon 1993, 113–114; Rowley 2001, 152–153).

In the classic 1940 novel Native Son, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas dreams of a life beyond his impoverished Chicago neighborhood.

Native Son is a 2019 American drama film directed by Rashid Johnson from a screenplay by Suzan-Lori Parks. It is based on the novel of the same name by Richard Wright.

In the following essay, Ramadanovic maintains that Native Son is a tragedy in the classical sense of the term, demonstrating the central role of fate in Wright's novel and the manner in which Bigger rises to the level of a tragic protagonist.

What is Max's argument in Native Son? ›

Max argues that the Daltons, despite their philanthropy, are blind to the world that has created Bigger and have themselves created the conditions that led to their daughter's murder. Max warns that killing Bigger quickly will not restrain others like him.

Wright divided his novel Native Son into three books: Fear, Flight, and Fate.

Dalton's literal blindness throughout the novel in his descriptions of other characters who are figuratively blind for one reason or another. Indeed, Bigger later realizes that, in a sense, even he has been blind, unable to see whites as individuals rather than a single oppressive mass.

Native Son demonstrates that violence is perpetuated by white objectification of blacks. In treating blacks as objects, whites create an environment that prevents blacks from identifying as human.

Native Son thus represents Wright's urgent warning that if American social and economic realities did not change, the oppressed masses would soon rise up in fury against those in power. Disenchanted over the Communist Party's attempts to control the content of his writing, Wright quietly split with the Party in 1942.