V-l BIGGER THOMAS
Bigger Thomas resorts to violence to achieve some exploits as a
man but we know that this method rushes him to electric chair. It is proper
both morally and socially speaking that the criminal must be penalised. The
tendency to ward violence reinforces the beliefs in one's own inferiority and
it warps one's sense of right and wrong. The use of violence as a springboard
for life in Native Son proves its short-term efficiency. Hence, violence
is not the most symbolic way of struggle
for life.
The complex of Bigger's personality comprises fear, shame, and
hatred as its primary elements. His consciousness of his fear creates a sense
of shame at his
own inadequacy, equated by whites with his racial status. The
combination ofthis fear and shame produces hatred, both self-hatred and hatred
for the inequities of
his life and the whites responsible for those iniquities and his
subsequent humiliation. Unable to cope with his dilemma in any rational way, he
responds by aggression and violence. Bigger's emotional pattern precludes any
viable human relationship. Bigger can attain a sense of life only by inflicting
death. Boris Max, however, offers Bigger the vision of a more constructive kind
of rebellion : he tries
to supplant Bigger's racial consciousness with class
consciousness.
The reactions of Bigger are unpredictable because his shattered
personality in response to his environment is always swaying between fear and
violence, love
and hate. Bigger is presented as a brutal individual, much
affected by violence. He lacks self-control and cannot hide the frustration,
the despair, the fear, and the hatred that are parts of his personality. He
himself offers a certain complexity that makes it difficult to make him fit in
any definite classification. He appears as an
ordinary Negro under the stress of racism, but at the same
time, he is subject to contradictory reactions of a victim and a rebel. That
rebel-victim is always on the brink of indulging in some verbal aggression or
brutality.
It seems that Native Son is a blinding and corrosive study
in hate. Bigger's hatred for whites is excessive. The lot of the blacks in
America is improving gradually, but the present disposition ofWhites will not
permit more rapid change. To demand immediate social justice, like Bigger, is
to upset the delicate balance in race relation achieved through the exercise of
exquisite, intuitive tact. Hatred, the preaching of hatred, and incitement can
only make a tolerable relationship intolerable. The portrayal of Bigger is so
unflinchingly harsh that the book will
have the boomerang effect of seeming to confirm white
prejudice.
Bigger is a violent individual whose violence is mostly directed
against his black brothers as an uncontrolled eruption of pent up
aggressiveness built over
periods of unbearable pressure. He hates the white world. because
it is dangled before him but remains untouchable. It is on his fellow sufferers
that he usually vents his hatred, it is then he dares to assault since he is
too frightened to attack his white persecutor. Why? The oppressed Bigger
attacks other oppressed people to right the balance and restore some of his ego
and self-valuation. Bigger is a persecuted person whose permanent dreams is to
become the persecutor. By aiming his violence at his fellow Blacks, Bigger acts
against his own battle. ln such
a situation, the fellow Black who can be a potential ally is not
differentiated from the oppressor.
The feeling of freedom after the accidental murder if Mary Dalton
shows the extent to which Bigger's personality has become warped. His newly
acquired freedom resembles almost insanity. Even if we agree to his partial
rebirth after Mary's murder, one is to acknowledge that Bigger has not become a
totally new and therefore psychologically sane individual. The most frightening
thing about Bigger is his complete divorce from the values of common humanity.
Feeling no
remorse for his terrible deeds, Bigger lives constantly with
this feeling till the end of the nove!, for he remains totally adamant to his
lawyer's exhortation to consider his oppressors more human beings like
himself.
The discovery of ms secret propels him into a process which rides
him definitely of whatever humanity is still left in him. Following the white
world clamouring for his life, the old atavistic feeling of fear and despair
corne back stronger than ever. Bigger goes back so rapidly to his old feeling
of being a hunted animal. Fleeing from the Dalton's home, he jumps through a
window and lands on the snow-carpeted earth; the shock is so hard that he
urinates : this symbolises his retum to an animal-like state. One then
understands that Bigger becomes a
wounded beast at bay, determined to kill in order to survive. He
totally revert to
jungle law. He creates and fosters animalistic instinct in
him. Feelings such as love, kindness, respect for human life are not innate to
Bigger. The hatred has left to him no possibility to a real human. Bigger could
have directed his revoIt against
a brutal oppressor, but instead he chooses as his victim a girl
who is friendly to Negroes. By this, he shows that his sickness is too deep to
be reached by kindness.
Bigger is compared to a wild animal ready to slash and tear out
its prey, or to a madman who, out of his sense, reacts under powerful impulses.
The white
oppressor does not less explain the. violence so settled in
the hero, for Bigger reveals a character without scruple, capable of all kind
of harm and absurdity. He has killed Mary Dalton inadvertently through fear.
But he feels no regret for it, he does not feel guilty. He is only worried
about the effective burning of the body so that the whole thing would not be
discovered. It seems that HE finds fulfilment only by the most violent defiance
of the society that oppresses him. No tears with Bigger Thomas, he is a
character to shock everyone. His uncontrollable rage bursts out in the form of
hideous violence: grotesque pictures are painted, bloodshed is not spared.
Bigger's world is a Manichean world with a sharp division along the
colour line. That is the pattern after which he views the world;
that is why, when Jan Erlone and Mary Dalton lavish their friendship on him, he
cannot responds
adequately and hate them for their offer.
The story is drawn to point out Bigger as a brutal and depraved
character, a brute whose savagery goes beyond ordinary humanity. Bigger has
natural aggressiveness, even if it is true that his attitudes are determined by
his environment. Despite social determinism, Bigger owns something, which is
left to him, it is his innate liberty that allows him to choose his course of
actions. He has thus chosen murder instead of other reactions, since the white
oppression gives birth to a variety of attitudes. The majority of the Black are
submitted to the same sufferings but they do not react the same way. The
unbearable white hostility
seems responsible for Bigger's plight; however he has a part
of responsibility for, instead other outlets, he chooses destructive rebeIlion
as a way of life. Is it worth rebelling as Bigger does? The remaining problem
is that such a murderous rebellion seems futile because it brings powerful
retaliation from the oppressors. It takes the form of self-destructive action
and finaIly confirms the white ascendancy.
Bigger is provided with a complex awareness : he is too
hypersensitive to racial realities and is too self-conscious to seem an actual
youth. Contrary to his companions who are unemployed and stifled, Bigger get
ajob and therefore he has little to complain of. Ris psychopathie lust for
violence seems to confirm the white man's fantasies of Negro, capable of any
crime unless kept aside.
Renceforth, Bigger is not a real existential hero; he is a victim
of social and environmental determinism. Bigger has become what he is, not
because he is free to choose his course of action, but because circumstances
over which he has no control have driven him to his doom. A Negro youth, unable
to adapt to his Jim Crow environment, goes berserk and winds up a kiIler.
Bigger almost psychopathic
lust for violence gets better of him, and his revoIt becomes as
completely phony and unreal.
AlI in aIl, Bigger Thomas' historical revoIt puts forth the
problem of violence as means of political action. Bigger is wrong to present
violence as a provisory means to prepare the advent of a society where aIl men
are equal. Indeed, how can we admit that it's necessary to destroy human values
so that they would be respected one day. RevoIt is for life, not against life.
There needs a part of moral in
any historical revoIt.
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