Native Son

The novel opens with Bigger killing a rat in the family's single room. We learn his world: unemployment, humiliation, the Southside ghetto. He spends the day with his gang at a pool hall, watches a movie, and robs a Black-owned diner at knifepoint.

Bigger's first day as chauffeur at the Dalton mansion. He meets the Daltons, their blind philanthropist mother, and the terrifyingly friendly Mary and her Communist boyfriend Jan. The evening ends with Bigger accidentally smothering Mary.

Bigger disposes of Mary's body, frames Jan, and begins to extort the Daltons. The press inflames racial panic. Bigger's lie begins to unravel when a reporter discovers Mary's remains in the furnace.

Bigger flees with his girlfriend Bessie. He realizes she will be a witness and be unable to stay silent. He beats her to death with a brick and throws her body down an airshaft. He hides in abandoned South Side buildings as the city shuts down around him.

Bigger is hunted across Chicago's rooftops in the freezing cold. He is caught after a crowd batters him with a water hose. A white mob gathers outside the jail, demanding a lynching. Bigger's psychological state deepens — he begins to understand, dimly, what he has done and why.

Boris Max, a Communist lawyer, agrees to defend Bigger. The state appoints a racist prosecutor. Max interviews Bigger at length and begins to understand what the murder means. The trial opens as a political spectacle.

Boris Max delivers a long, passionate speech arguing that Bigger is the product of American racism — that his violence was inevitable given the world that formed him. The prosecution responds with appeals to racial terror. Bigger listens, beginning to understand himself in Max's terms.

Bigger waits on death row. Max visits for a final conversation. Bigger articulates, for the first time, a theory of his own existence — that killing was the only act that made him real. Max is horrified. Bigger is executed. The novel refuses resolution.