Native Son, By Richard Wright

In the novel Native Son, Wright shows how the white race has power. The character Bigger Thomas struggles to escape the racism in the story. Bigger Thomas is a poor African-American man residing in the southside of Chicago. The author uses imagery to help the reader imagine what the residence appears to be like. The story starts with Bigger trying to rid a rat in his home. Bigger lives in this poor white community away from white establishments. The racism is shown early on in the book by the dialogue between Bigger and his friend Gus. They discuss the treatment of the blacks and they pretend to have a conversation as they assume the white men do. Bigger quotes “I feel like something awful is going to happen to me. Me being black and them being white, me being here and them being there”, him saying that foreshadows the events that are to take place in this book. The quote makes the reader aware of how paranoid bigger is about the superiority of the whites in his community. He assumes that they can do anything and everything when they want just because they are white.
Fear is the main theme in this work.
What is the fear derived from, though? The fear Bigger expresses in the story is from the power that the whites have.Bigger gets a new job with a rich family the Daltons. His first task is to drive their young daughter Mary to the university at eight that night. As he driving the author puts the reader in his thoughts. There he has a conversation with himself about how the white people get to live. Driving through town passing fancy upper-class restaurants, he begins to envy them. When Bigger agrees to take Mary to see her boyfriend instead of going to the university, this fear of the whites begins to grow. He meets her boyfriend and he is very talkative. Bigger chooses not to respond because he feels like Jan has this power over him and has a sense that he is mocking him in a
way. When bigger kills Mary he knows he has to get far away because “he knows what the white people will do when they find out”. In the book, the whites seem to hold all of the power since the story takes place in the early 1900s.the black race was seen as inferior and the public places were segregated. Blacks did not have the same rights as the white people or to be specific the white men. That is why bigger struggled so much in the novel because he knew how much power the white men had and he could not escape it. He knew if and when he was caught he would not have a fair trial, the men would not listen to his side of the story.he felt as if there was no way around the power that the white men had. The struggle between the races does not end in the book. Even in the very end, Bigger knows that he never had a chance because of the color of his skin. He knew he could never escape the white authority even though he tried. The author makes Bigger seem so hopeless.