Native Son Critical Analysis

Tale of Two Cities On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama ("Birmingham Church Bombing" 1). The Ku Klux Klan had threatened to detonate a bomb in response to the federal court decision mandating the integration of Alabama's school system (3). No part of Birmingham was safe to African Americans as the Ku Klux Klan had set off two other bombs in the past 10 days targeting civil rights meetings (3).Throughout the 20th century, civil rights activists such as Richard Wright have discussed the omnipresence of racism. In Wright's novel Native Son, Bigger Thomas, a young African American in Chicago, is subjected to unyielding racism through verbal abuse and unfair treatment. To Bigger the inhumane
The scene begins with Bigger and his brother Buddy trying to kill the rat by trapping it behind a trunk and throwing a pan at it. This parallels the hunt for Bigger after the whites discover he is Mary's murderer. Instead of trying to understand the foreign being in their society or apartment both groups immediately respond with a thirst for blood. Margara Averbach explains in her critical essay "An Overview of Native Son" that "the rat and Bigger are violent with each other, as white and black people are" (2). However Bigger is also guilty of jumping to violence. Both he and the rat respond with violence without hesitation. When cornered, the rat "leap[s] at Bigger's trouser leg and snag[s] it in his teeth" much like how Bigger attacks Gus (Wright 5). Bigger and the rat's readiness for violence is a result of fear of the other race or species. The whites and blacks, especially Bigger, feel cornered by the other race so they react much like the rat or any other cornered animal (Averbach 2). Each race's militaristic reactions to this pressure creates a cycle of racism and oppression that becomes deeper and deeper through the years until one side breaks resulting in the murder of Mary Dalton and the manhunt for Bigger. Their reactions also indicate that although blacks were being given more rights during this time period, the white population
Bigger is pressured to fight back against whites from the beginning of the novel. He is miserable in his cramped apartment and yearns to fly away. Instead he is forced to remain complacent with his subhuman treatment until he lashes out. However the practice of entrapment is not limited to Chicago in the 1930s. One example of this is in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce. In this short story, the main character, Farquhar meets a Union soldier disguised as a Confederate soldier who tells him that a group of Union soldiers are going to cross a bridge of dry timber that would be easy to burn. While the soldier's deceit is a much less severe case of entrapment than what Bigger encountered, Farquhar never would have attempted to burn the bridge if the supposed confederate soldier had not incited violence in him. This also ties into the Birmingham Church Bombing. African Americans in Birmingham feared for the lives of themselves and their families as the Ku Klux Klan silenced African American voices for civil rights through terroristic threats. At first African Americans felt it was necessary to fight back with equal force, but violent reaction from the black community would have deepened the divide between races in