Native Son
Richard Wright (1940)
“The most violent and uncomfortable novel in the American literary canon — and the one that most honestly tells the truth about what racism does to the human soul.”
Characters in Native Son
by Richard Wright · 1940 · 6 characters analyzed
Cast: Bigger Thomas, Boris Max, Mary Dalton, Bessie Mears, Henry Dalton, Jan Erlone.
Character Analysis
Bigger is one of the most deliberately difficult protagonists in American literature. Wright refuses to make him conventionally sympathetic — he is violent, misogynistic, racist toward other Black characters, and ultimately murders his girlfriend in cold blood. This is the point. Bigger is what the American system produced. He is not a martyr or a villain — he is a consequence. His final self-articulation — 'What I killed for, I am' — is the novel's most disturbing and most honest line.
Short sentences, vernacular, rarely uses abstract vocabulary — but his interiority in close third-person is elaborate and psychologically acute