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

Native Son The Quest for Identity The violence depicted in Native Son, although quite grotesque, is absolutely necessary to deliver the full meaning that Richard Wright wishes to convey. Biggers many acts of violence are, in effect, a quest for a soul. He desires an identity element that is his alone. Both the white and the black communities withstand robbed him of dignity, identity, and individuality. The human side of the city is closed to him, and for the approximately part Bigger relates more to the faceless mass of the buildings and the uncommunicative body of the city than to another human being. He constantly sums up his feelings of frustration as wanting to blot out those around him, as they have effectively blocked him out of their lives by assuming that he allow for fail in any endeavor before he tries. He has feelings, too, of fear, as Wright remarks He was following a strange path in a strange land (p.127). His mothers philosophy of suffering to wait for a later va ntage is equally stagnating -- to Bigger it appears that she is weak and will not fight to live. Her religion is a blindness but she needs to be blind in separate to survive, to fit into a society that would drive a seeing person mad. All of the characters that Bigger says are blind are living in sliminess because the light is too painful. Bigger wants to break through that blindness, to discover something of worth in himself, thinking that all one had to do was be bold, do something zip 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 imagine that made them blind, and if he could see while others were blind, then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it (p.120). Just as ... ...ne who will remember. His thought Max did not even know (p.494) shows some of the passion behind his quest for self. If extreme emotions are polar opposites of each other, and one is natural simply with the c apacity for emotion itself, then Bigger could have been great. But the image 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 full-strength or brilliantly creative. But he has the capacity for all of those things, and has not been given the chance to fulfill them. His discourtesy of violence is as much the crime of the people around him, who stifled his soul and nourished the other, baser side of him that was the only way he had of self-expression.