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

Native Son The Quest for Identity The military force depicted in Native Son, although quite grotesque, is absolutely necessary to take in the full meaning that Richard Wright wishes to convey. largers many acts of violence are, in effect, a require for a soul. He desires an identity that is his alone. Both the white and the black communities take for robbed him of dignity, identity, and individuality. The human side of the city is closed to him, and for the nigh part Bigger relates more to the faceless mass of the buildings and the mute body of the city than to other human being. He constantly sums up his feelings of frustration as lacking to blot out those around him, as they have effectively jam him out of their lives by assuming that he will fail in any endeavor before he tries. He has feelings, too, of fear, as Wright remarks He was following a unsung path in a strange land (p.127). His mothers philosophy of suffering to wait for a later yield is equ all(prenominal)y stagnating -- to Bigger it appears that she is weak and will not fight to live. Her pietism is a blindness but she needs to be blind in order to survive, to fit into a society that would drive a eyesight person mad. All of the characters that Bigger says are blind are liveness in darkness because the light is too painful. Bigger wants to break done that blindness, to discover something of worth 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 great hunger to believe that made them blind, and if he could take in while others were blind, then he could get what he wanted and neer be caught at it (p.120). Just as ... ...ne who will remember. His thought gook did not even know (p.494) shows some of the passion behind his need for self. If extreme emotions are polar opposites of each other, and one is born only when with the capacity for emotion itself, then Bigger could have been great. But the watch 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 given the chance to fulfill them. His crime of violence is as much the crime of the people around him, who stifled his soul and provide the other, baser side of him that was the only way he had of self-expression.