Oppression (native son)
Oppression (native son)Oppression
In the novel Native Son written by Richard Wright a young adult named Bigger Thomas goes through a metamorphosis, from sanity to
insanity. He starts out a normal trouble youth, living in a run down
housing project, where all he does is hang out with his gang. But the
city relief program gives him an opportunity to work and make
something of himself. All he has to do is chauffeur for a very rich
family. But on his first job everything goes wrong and he ends up
murdering the family’s daughter. Through this novel Bigger meets
many other people, which have the same oppression as him but handle
it in different ways. Some of these people include his mother, his
girlfriend, and Max his lawyer. All of these people have a certain
amount of oppression given to them by the outside world. The only
difference is the way each one of them handle it.
Ever since Bigger was a little boy he has felt very oppressed by the world because he was black. Bigger feels that he has nothing to be proud of so he takes this oppression to the heart and turns it into fear. The only way that he could express himself was to show the world that they should not oppress what they don’t know the power of. Bigger demonstrated that he should be feared and acknowledged by murdering the daughter of a very rich family. At one point after Bigger killed the daughter stated that “...for the first time in my fear-ridden life a barrier of protection between him and a world of fear.”(p. 119) Bigger feels as though know that he has killed this person that all will be well because of this new sense of power that he received from doing this horrible act. At this point Bigger feels assured that he could fool the world into thinking that he was normal. He started referring to all the people around him as blind, even when they where already physically blind; “Ms. Dalton was blind; yes blind in more ways than one”(p. 120) but in his own mind he no longer felt the oppression or fear after he killed the Daughter.
The next most oppressed person is Bigger’s mother. She can not get a job because she is black and is of the female gender. So the world has oppressed her into poverty and the only way that she can respond to this oppression is to pray and worship the lord. You can tell that this is her only release because she uses it frequently in the book. In the very first time she was in the book she was already using it. “Lord, Lord, have mercy...”(p. 5) she stated as Bigger killed a merciless rat. Later no in that same conversation she...
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